Count words, characters, sentences and paragraphs as you type, with reading and speaking time. Free, and your text stays in your browser.
Type into the box above or paste a document into it, and every count updates as you type: words, characters with and without spaces, sentences, paragraphs, lines, and an estimate of how long the text takes to read and to say aloud. There is no button to press and no length limit. Paste replaces what is in the box with your clipboard, and Clear empties it.
A word starts with a letter or a digit and carries on through letters, digits, apostrophes, hyphens and underscores. So a contraction like isn’t is one word, a hyphenated compound like well-known is one word, and a number such as 2026 is one word. Punctuation on its own is never a word: a dash between two clauses, an ellipsis or a stray bullet adds nothing, and neither does an emoji. Letters with accents count like any other letter, so café is one word, not two.
Well-known isn’t 3 words — it’s 2.6 words
Characters are counted the way you see them, one per letter, digit, symbol, space or line break. That sounds obvious, but many counters measure the length of the underlying string instead, which counts an emoji or a rarer symbol as two, so text full of emoji comes out longer than it is. The count without spaces leaves out every kind of whitespace (spaces, tabs and line breaks), which is the figure some assignments and translation quotes ask for. One limit worth knowing: an emoji built from several joined pieces, such as a family, counts as each of its pieces.
Hello 😀 world13 characters, 11 without spaces
A sentence ends at a full stop, question mark, exclamation mark or ellipsis followed by a space or the end of the text, and at a paragraph break, so a heading with no full stop still counts as its own sentence. A decimal like 3.14 or a version number like v1.2 does not end one. Abbreviations do: Dr. Smith arrived. counts as two sentences here, as it does in most online counters. A paragraph is a block of text separated from the next by a blank line. Lines are counted separately, one per line break, which is the figure to use for poems, lyrics and lists.
Reading time assumes 238 words a minute, the average silent reading speed for non-fiction found by a 2019 review of 190 studies by Marc Brysbaert. Speaking time assumes 130 words a minute, a comfortable pace for a talk or a presentation; conversation runs faster and a careful reading of a speech slower. Both are estimates for a typical adult reading in their first language, so treat them as a guide to length rather than a timer: 1,000 words comes out at about four minutes to read and seven and a half to deliver.
Words are recognised in every script that separates them with spaces, including Arabic, Cyrillic, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi and the accented Latin alphabets, so Привет, мир counts as two words. Chinese, Japanese and Thai are different: they are written without spaces between words, and splitting them correctly needs a dictionary, so a run of those characters counts as a single word here. For text in those languages the character count is the reliable figure, and it is also the unit most style guides and translation rates use for them.
Everything is counted by JavaScript in your browser as you type. The site is a static page with no server behind it, so an unpublished essay, a client document or a draft you would rather nobody saw is never uploaded or stored. The only analytics on the page record which button was pressed, never anything you typed.
Copy the text out of your document and paste it into the box at the top of this page. The word count, character count, sentences, paragraphs and reading time all update instantly. There is no limit on length and nothing to install.
Yes, both. Characters counts everything including spaces and line breaks; Characters (no spaces) leaves out every kind of whitespace, which is the figure many assignments and translation quotes ask for.
Yes. A word runs through apostrophes and hyphens, so isn’t, don’t and well-known each count once. A dash standing on its own between two words is punctuation and is not counted.
Whole numbers do: 2026 is one word. Emoji and punctuation on their own do not, because they contain no letter or digit, though they still count as characters. A decimal such as 3.5 counts as two words, because the full stop is treated as punctuation.
Every counter draws the line somewhere slightly different, mostly over standalone punctuation, dashes, symbols and URLs. Differences are usually a handful of words in a long document. If a deadline or a form enforces a limit, check against the counter that the limit is measured with.
The word count divided by 238 words a minute, the average adult silent reading speed for non-fiction in a 2019 review of reading-rate studies. Speaking time uses 130 words a minute, a typical pace for a presentation.
Characters are counted correctly, but words are not split, because those languages put no spaces between words. A run of Chinese or Japanese characters counts as one word, so use the character count for text in those languages.
No. The counting runs in your browser and the text never leaves your device. Nothing is stored, so closing or reloading the page clears it.