Word Counter
Type or paste, and the counts move with every keystroke. Words, characters with and without spaces, sentences, paragraphs, and roughly how long the text takes to read.
- Words
- 0
- Characters
- 0
- Without spaces
- 0
- Sentences
- 0
- Paragraphs
- 0
- Lines
- 0
- Reading time
- 0 sec
- Read aloud
- 0 sec
Most used words
Nothing to count yet.
Runs entirely in your browser. Your files are never uploaded.
How to use Word Counter
- 1Type into the box, or paste text in from anywhere.
- 2Read the counts beside it as you write.
- 3Open the word list to see which words you lean on.
- 4Copy the text back out when you are finished.
What counts as a word
A word here is a run of characters with whitespace around it. That keeps "don't" and "well-known" as one word each, which is how a person reading the sentence would count them, and it is also what most word processors do.
Chinese, Japanese and Korean are handled differently because they are written without spaces. Each character counts as a word, so a Japanese paragraph reports a few hundred words instead of one enormous one. A run that mixes scripts, like a product name inside a Japanese sentence, counts the Latin part once and each CJK character separately.
Reading and speaking time
Reading time uses 225 words a minute, a common figure for silent reading of ordinary prose. Speaking time uses 130, which is near a steady presentation pace rather than a rush.
Both are averages applied to your word count, so treat them as a sense of scale. Dense technical writing reads slower than that, and a list of names reads faster.
The word list
The frequency list exists for one job: seeing what you repeat without noticing. Turning off the common words hides "the" and "and" so the terms that carry meaning rise to the top, and the percentage next to each one is its share of every word in the text, which is the same figure usually called keyword density.
Limits
- Sentence counting treats any full stop as an ending, so "e.g." pushes the count up.
- Reading and speaking times are averages, not a measurement of your text.
- Nothing is stored. Reloading the page clears the box.
Frequently asked questions
- Why is my count different from Microsoft Word?
- Usually the definition of a word, not an error in either. Word counts a hyphenated compound as one word and so does this tool, but numbers, footnotes and text boxes are all treated differently by different programs. For a hard limit, trust whichever tool your marker or editor uses.
- Does the character count include spaces?
- Both figures are shown. The one marked without spaces removes every space, tab and line break, which is the count social platforms and some forms actually enforce.
- How are emoji counted?
- As one character each, even though most emoji take two units of storage. An emoji with a skin tone or a flag can still count as more than one, because those are built from several characters joined together.
- Is my text sent anywhere?
- No. The counting happens in the page in front of you, and the text never leaves your browser. There is no request to a server at any point, which you can confirm in your browser's network panel.
- Can I count the words in a PDF or a Word file?
- Not directly here. Convert the PDF with the PDF to Text tool first, then paste the result in. For a Word file, copying the text out of the document is quicker than any conversion.