How to use this word counter
- Paste your text into the box, or type straight into it.
- Read the live report; it updates on every keystroke and the text stays in your browser between visits.
- Press Copy summary to put a one-line report on the clipboard for an editor, a brief or a submission form.
How words are counted
A word is a run of Unicode letters or digits, with combining marks kept attached, optionally joined by an apostrophe, hyphen or a dot: don't, well-known and e.g. each count as one. Punctuation on its own, em dashes and stray symbols count as nothing. This is a counting rule, not language-aware segmentation. Results can differ from other editors, especially for languages such as Chinese, Japanese or Thai that do not consistently separate words with spaces. For example, école हिंदी well-known counts as three words; an accented letter written with a separate combining mark stays in the same word.
How sentences and paragraphs are counted
A sentence ends at a full stop, question mark or exclamation mark, possibly followed by a closing quote or bracket, or at a line break. Abbreviations are the known weak spot: "Dr. Smith arrived." reads as two sentences to a simple rule, and to this one. Treat the sentence count and the words-per-sentence figure as a good estimate, not a verdict. A paragraph is any block of text separated from the next by a blank line, which is how paragraphs are typed in email, Markdown and most CMS fields; single line breaks do not start a new one.
Reading time and speaking time
Reading time assumes 200 words per minute; speaking time assumes 130. These fixed rates give rough planning estimates, not a measurement of your pace. Language, difficulty and pauses change the actual time. A 260-word script shows 2 minutes of speaking time. Short estimates are shown in seconds.
Top keywords
Every word is lowercased and tallied, skipping about 130 English function words (articles, pronouns, prepositions, auxiliary verbs), single letters and bare numbers. The ten most frequent remain. It is a quick way to see whether a draft actually talks about what the title promises, or to catch a word you have used eleven times without noticing.
Word counter FAQs
Why does my word count differ from Microsoft Word or Google Docs?
Each tool draws the line between words differently. This counter only counts runs of letters or digits, so "well-known" is one word, "don't" is one word, and a stray hyphen is zero. Counts can differ for hyphenated words, punctuation and languages without spaces.
Does the character count include spaces?
Both numbers are shown. "Characters" counts everything including spaces and line breaks; "without spaces" drops all whitespace. Characters are counted as Unicode code points. A combined accent or multi-part emoji can count as more than one. Platform limits may use different rules, so check the destination when length matters.
How is reading time calculated?
Words divided by an assumed 200 per minute for reading or 130 per minute for speaking. These are rough estimates; your pace, language and pauses will change the actual time.
Is my text uploaded anywhere?
No. Counting happens in your browser with a few lines of JavaScript, and the text is kept in localStorage only so it survives a reload. Your text is not sent to a server. See the privacy page.
Which words are left out of the keyword list?
About 130 English function words such as "the", "and", "of", "is", "you", plus single letters and pure numbers. The rest are counted case-insensitively and the ten most frequent are shown with their counts.
Is there a limit on how much text I can paste?
Not a fixed one. Large texts take longer to process, depending on your device. Browser storage caps the saved copy at a few megabytes, but counting still works past that.