Word Counter

What this counts

Paste text and this reports words, characters with and without spaces, sentences, paragraphs, and estimated reading and speaking time. It updates as you type, and everything is computed in your browser.

How a word is counted

Words are counted as sequences separated by whitespace, which is the same method used by word processors. A few consequences follow that explain most discrepancies between tools:

• Hyphenated words count as one. "Well-known" is a single word.
• Contractions count as one. "Don't" is one word, not two.
• Numbers and dates count as words. "2026" is one word.
• Em dashes with spaces around them may count as a word in some tools; joined dashes do not.
• URLs count as a single word however long.

Different tools apply these rules differently, which is why the same document can produce counts varying by a percent or two between Word, Google Docs and a web counter. For an assignment with a strict limit, the count that matters is the one your marker will use.

Character limits worth knowing

Note that search engines truncate titles and descriptions by pixel width rather than character count, so a title full of wide capitals is cut earlier than one of the same length in narrow lowercase letters. The character figures above are approximations of that.

Reading and speaking time

Reading speed varies enormously with material and reader, but the working averages are:

A useful planning figure for talks: a 10-minute presentation is roughly 1,300-1,500 words of script, and people almost always overrun because they write for reading pace rather than speaking pace. Reading aloud with a timer is the only reliable check.

Characters are not always what they seem

Character counting gets complicated once you leave plain ASCII. An emoji is one visible character but several bytes, and complex emoji — family groups, skin-tone variants, flags — are multiple code points joined together. Accented letters may be one precomposed character or a letter plus a combining mark, which look identical and count differently.

This matters practically for SMS. A message containing any non-GSM character, including most emoji and curly quotes, switches the whole message to a different encoding and drops the limit from 160 characters to 70. A single smart apostrophe pasted from a word processor can therefore double the cost of a bulk send.

Word count as a writing signal

For web content, word count correlates with ranking mainly because thorough coverage tends to be longer, not because length itself is rewarded. Padding a 600-word answer to 2,000 words makes it worse. The useful question is whether the piece answers what the reader came for — and length should follow from that rather than lead it.

Sentence length is the more actionable statistic. Averages of 15-20 words read comfortably; consistently above 25 becomes heavy going. Varying sentence length matters as much as the average, since uniform sentences read as monotonous however short they are.

Nothing is uploaded

Counting runs in your browser as you type. Your text is never transmitted or stored, which matters for anything unpublished or confidential. You can verify it in your developer tools Network tab.

Frequently asked questions