Word counter
What the word counter does
This word counter counts words, characters, sentences, paragraphs and reading time for any text you paste or type, updating live so you can watch a count climb toward a limit before you write past it.
It runs in your browser. Nothing is uploaded or stored, and there's no cap on how much you count or how often you return. No account, nothing to pay for.
That matters more than it sounds: a counter that sends your draft to a server before returning a number is one you must trust with an essay or an unpublished manuscript. This one never asks for that trust, since the arithmetic happens locally on your machine.
How it works
How to count words in three steps
There's no button to press and nothing to configure. Counting starts the moment you type.
- Step 1
- Paste your text into the box, or type it directly.
- Step 2
- Watch the counts update instantly above the box as you go.
- Step 3
- Check the number against whatever limit you're writing to, and keep editing.
The numbers
What the word counter actually counts
A word count alone rarely answers the question someone has: this tool breaks text down six ways, since a form field, a script and a printed page are each limited by a different one.
The six figures come from the same pass over your text, so they stay in sync: edit a sentence and every number updates together.
- Words
- Counted as sequences of letters and digits separated by whitespace or punctuation.
- Characters with spaces
- Every character in the text, including spaces and line breaks: the number most character limits mean.
- Characters without spaces
- The same text with whitespace excluded, what a database column or fixed-width field usually cares about.
- Sentences
- Counted at sentence-ending punctuation: periods, question marks and exclamation marks.
- Paragraphs
- Counted as blocks of text separated by a blank line.
- Reading time
- An estimate in minutes, based on an average silent reading speed for the word count.
Why the number changes
Why word counts differ between tools
Paste the same paragraph into Word, Docs and this tool, and you can get three different totals, all correct: they disagree only on where one word ends and the next begins.
Hyphens are the most common split: 'well-known' counts as one word or two, depending on whether a tool treats the hyphen as a letter or a space.
A pasted URL is one long word to most counters, though a word processor may reformat it first. An em dash with no spaces joins the words for one counter, but stays two for another.
Smart quotes and apostrophes add a smaller gap, since a curly apostrophe from a web page differs from a straight one typed on a keyboard, splitting 'don't' into two tokens for a counter checking the wrong character.
None of this makes a tool wrong, just differently ruled. When an exact number matters, count with whichever tool the limit was written for, or leave a small margin.
Common targets
Word count targets people write to
Most searches for a word counter start with a specific number in mind. These are the limits that come up most often.
- Essays and assignments
- Word limits set by a course or brief, usually with a stated tolerance of ten percent either way.
- Meta descriptions
- Measured in characters, not words, usually kept under roughly 155–160 characters so search engines don't cut them off.
- Tweets and short posts
- A hard character limit, so the characters-with-spaces count matters more than the word count.
- Personal statements
- UCAS and similar application forms set a firm character or word ceiling that rejects text over the limit.
- Abstracts
- Journals and conferences typically set a word ceiling, often between 150 and 300 words, enforced strictly at submission.
- Cover letters
- Rarely a strict number, but conventionally kept to roughly 300–400 words so it reads as one page.
- Product and ad copy
- Headlines, subject lines and ad platforms cap by character, truncating silently past it rather than rejecting the text.
Who it's for
Who uses a word counter, and when
Students use it while drafting essays and personal statements against a set limit, checking as they write rather than finding out too late at submission.
Writers and editors use it to hit a brief: a set article length, a fixed headline or caption count. Marketers use it for meta descriptions and ad copy measured in characters, not words.
Job seekers keep a cover letter or bio inside a field's character cap. Anyone pasting into a form that silently truncates checks the number here first.
Speakers use the reading-time estimate to gauge a script's length before finding out the hard way on stage. Translators compare source and target text, since languages expand or contract by a margin.
Character counter
Character counter: with spaces or without
Most character-limited fields mean characters with spaces, the number a browser or form validator checks. This tool shows both counts side by side, so there's no guess about which one a field enforces.
The gap between the two grows with longer text and more whitespace, the usual reason a word count looks right while a character count still fails. Check whichever count your field measures against.
Other languages
Does the word counter work in languages other than English?
Yes, for character counts: every character in any script counts the same way regardless of language. The word count needs care, since it splits at whitespace, and not every language spaces between words.
French, German and Spanish space words like English, so the word count behaves the same here. Chinese, Japanese and similar languages that don't space between words get a count closer to characters or short runs, so the character totals are more reliable.