Word Counter

A word counter tells you how much text you have written. Paste or type into the box and seven figures update instantly: words, characters with and without spaces, sentences, paragraphs, and estimated reading and speaking time. Everything is counted in your browser, so nothing is uploaded.

What each figure is actually for

Different limits count different things, which is why all seven are shown at once rather than making you pick. Words is what academic briefs and journalism budgets use.Characters including spaces is what social platforms and meta tags count.Characters without spaces turns up in database fields and some submission forms.Sentences and paragraphs matter when a form says "answer in three paragraphs" or when you are checking readability. Reading and speaking time are for scripting: a talk, a video voiceover, or a conference slot with a hard cut-off.

Common limits worth knowing

How reading and speaking time are estimated

Reading time divides your word count by 200 words per minute, a common average for adult silent reading of general English prose. Speaking time uses 130 words per minute. Treat both as planning figures rather than promises. Dense technical writing, unfamiliar names, and tables all slow a reader down, while a practised presenter reading a familiar script speeds up. For a talk with a firm time limit, rehearse aloud and time yourself: most people deliver a first draft slower than they expect, and nerves on the day tend to push the pace up again.

Writing to a word count without padding

1. Draft past the target, then cut. Trimming a long draft produces tighter prose than stretching a short one.
2. Aim mid-range. If the brief says 1,500 to 2,000, land near 1,750 rather than scraping the floor or the ceiling.
3. Check what is excluded. References, appendices, and sometimes footnotes often fall outside the count.
4. Cut qualifiers first. "Very", "quite", "in order to", and "it is important to note that" are pure volume.
5. Watch the paragraph count if the form specifies a structure, not just a length.

Why two tools disagree about your word count

It is common to paste the same text into two counters and get slightly different totals, which is unsettling when you are near a hard limit. The differences come from edge cases rather than errors. A standalone em dash, a numeral, or a URL may count as a word in one tool and be skipped in another. Hyphenated compounds are sometimes split into two. Text inside footnotes, headers, captions, and reference lists is included by some word processors and excluded by others. Track changes and comments add another layer again. If a submission is close to the ceiling, the count that matters is the one produced by whatever the marker or editor opens the file in, so leave yourself a small margin rather than trusting any single figure to the exact word.

Why counting locally matters

Text is often the most sensitive thing a person pastes into a website. Manuscripts before submission, legal wording, a personal statement, unreleased marketing copy, internal announcements. A counter that posts your draft to a server for a job JavaScript can do in a millisecond is a bad trade. Here the computation happens as you type, with no network request, so the page keeps working offline and there is nothing stored to leak later.

Related text tools

To fix the casing of a draft, the case converter handles sentence case and title case properly. For a per-word breakdown of what you overuse, theword frequency counter is more revealing than a total. If you are timing a script, words to minutes is built for exactly that, and thereadability checker tells you whether the prose matches your audience.

Measure your typing speed too

How fast you produce a draft depends as much on typing as on thinking. To measure your words per minute and accuracy, or to practise touch typing properly, tryTypingProo, a free online typing speed test.