Word Counter

How to use the Word Counter

1. Type directly into the box or paste text from any document, email or web page. The counts update as you type.
2. Read the totals in the boxes below the text. Characters are counted the way a person would count them, so an emoji or an accented letter counts as one.
3. To check text against a limit, choose a preset such as “Meta description” or set your own. The bar shows how much room is left.
4. Open Most frequent words to see which words you use most, excluding common words like “the” and “and”.
5. Use Open .txt file to count a plain-text file without pasting it, and Clear to start again.

Example: what counts as a word, a sentence and a paragraph

Paste this short text:

Dr. Lee’s well-known café opens at 7:30 a.m.
It’s busy by eight!

Try the flat white — it’s excellent.

• Words: 18. “well-known”, “it’s”, “7:30” and “a.m.” each count as one word.
• Sentences: 3. “Dr.” is recognised as a title rather than the end of a sentence, and the line break after “a.m.” ends the first sentence.
• Paragraphs: 2, because paragraphs are separated by a blank line; lines: 3.
• Characters: “café” counts as four characters, even though the é could be stored as two code points.

When an accurate count matters

Length limits are everywhere: assignments with a word range, application forms that cut off text, ad platforms and social networks with hard character caps, and meta descriptions that are shortened in search results. Going over a limit can mean a rejected submission or a message that stops mid-sentence; staying well under it can waste space you could have used.

A word processor will give you a count, but often only for words, and not for the exact text you are about to paste into a web form. This counter shows all the common measures at once, for exactly the text in the box.

How each figure is calculated

• Words are found with the browser’s built-in, language-aware word segmentation (Intl.Segmenter), which understands contractions, hyphenated words and numbers. Punctuation and symbols on their own are not words.
• Characters are counted as grapheme clusters — the units a reader sees. An emoji made of several code points, such as a family or a flag, counts as one.
• Characters without spaces excludes spaces, tabs and line breaks.
• Sentences use the browser’s sentence segmentation, which handles decimal numbers, with an extra rule so common titles and abbreviations such as “Dr.”, “Mrs.” and “e.g.” do not end a sentence.
• Paragraphs are blocks of text separated by one or more blank lines; lines counts every non-empty line.
• Reading time assumes 238 words per minute, the average silent reading speed for non-fiction found in a 2019 review of reading-rate studies; speaking time assumes 150 words per minute, a typical presentation pace.

Who uses a word counter

Students checking an essay against a word range, writers and editors working to a brief, marketers fitting copy into ad and social media limits, translators quoting by word count, and anyone filling in an online form with a character limit.

Limitations to keep in mind

• Different programs count slightly differently. Microsoft Word, Google Docs and this tool may disagree by a few words on text with unusual punctuation, URLs or symbols.
• Word counts for languages written without spaces between words, such as Chinese, Japanese and Thai, depend on your browser’s dictionary and should be treated as estimates.
• Some platforms count characters differently from what you see — for example, X counts every link as 23 characters regardless of its length.
• Reading and speaking times are averages; actual times vary with the reader and the difficulty of the text.

How your data is handled

Counting happens in your browser as you type. Your text is not sent to a server, saved in cookies or stored after you leave the page. Opened files are read locally.

Frequently asked questions