Words, characters, sentences and reading time as you type.
Your text stays in this tab and is never sent anywhere.
The Word Counter gives you words, characters, characters without spaces, sentences, paragraphs and an estimated reading time, all updating as you type. It also shows the limits people are usually counting against — a tweet, a meta description, an SMS segment.
Counting words is less obvious than it looks. Splitting on spaces gets hyphenated words wrong, miscounts emoji, and does not work at all for Chinese, Japanese or Thai, which do not put spaces between words. Where your browser supports it, this tool uses the built-in Intl.Segmenter, which understands all three.
Characters are counted by code point rather than by the units JavaScript stores them in, so an emoji counts as one character instead of two. Nothing you type is transmitted or stored.
Essays and applications are usually capped, and going over can cost marks. The count updates live, so you can see where you stand while you edit rather than after.
Search engines truncate a description somewhere around 160 characters. The character count and the limit are both on screen, so you can write to it.
Useful for a newsletter, a blog post or a talk. The reading speed is adjustable, because a technical document and a casual post are not read at the same rate.
Translators, copywriters and editors often quote per word. Paste the document and the number is there, without opening a word processor.
The counts start updating immediately. There is no button and nothing to submit.
Words, characters, characters without spaces, sentences and paragraphs are all live. Underneath, the common limits show how the text measures against a tweet, a meta description and an SMS.
The default of 238 words per minute is the average for adults reading English prose. Drop it for dense material or raise it for skimming.
Copy returns exactly what you put in — the tool never edits your text, only measures it.
By word boundary rather than by space. That means “twenty-one” counts as one word, an em dash between words does not merge them, and languages written without spaces are counted correctly rather than being reported as a single enormous word.
Sentences are detected from terminating punctuation, so abbreviations like “Dr. Smith” or “e.g.” can read as an extra sentence. Every tool that does not parse grammar has this limitation; it is worth knowing about rather than trusting blindly for a precise figure.
Here, yes. Many counters report common emoji as two characters and flags as four, because that is how they are stored internally. This counts by code point, which matches what you see on screen.
No. It stays in the page, is never sent anywhere, and is gone when you close the tab. Nothing is written to storage.
It is an estimate: words divided by a reading speed. 238 words per minute is the figure from meta-analyses of adult silent reading of English prose. Technical or unfamiliar material is slower, and reading aloud is much slower — roughly 130 words per minute.
No. Pasting from a word processor brings the text only, so headings and body copy are counted the same way and no hidden markup is included in the totals.