Word Counter

Count words, characters, sentences, paragraphs, and lines, plus reading and speaking time. Runs in your browser; your text is never uploaded.

Your stuff stays yours. The conversion happens in this page's JavaScript. Nothing you paste here leaves your machine, and the tool keeps working with the network unplugged.

Counts update the moment you press the button: words, characters with and without spaces, sentences, paragraphs, and lines, plus estimated reading and speaking time. The word count uses Unicode-aware matching, so accented names, Cyrillic, Greek, and hyphenated words count correctly - tools that split on ASCII spaces routinely miscount anything that is not plain English. Reading time uses 238 words per minute, the average adult silent-reading rate found in a 2019 meta-analysis of 190 studies; speaking time uses a 130 wpm presentation pace. Because everything runs in this tab, it is safe for text you cannot paste into a random website: unpublished manuscripts, legal drafts, confidential reports.

How to use the word counter

Paste or type your text into the Text in box. Line breaks and blank lines are kept exactly as you enter them, and they affect the paragraph and line counts.
Press Count. The Counts out box fills with eight rows: words, characters, characters with no spaces, sentences, paragraphs, lines, reading time, and speaking time.
Edit your text and press Count again whenever you want fresh numbers. The counts do not refresh on their own while you type.
Use Copy result to put the whole report on your clipboard, for example to paste into a submission form or a project note, or Clear to empty both boxes.

What each number actually measures

Every counter makes choices, and the choices explain why two tools can disagree about the same essay. Here is what this one does, row by row.

Words are runs that start with a letter or digit and continue through letters, digits, apostrophes, and hyphens. Anything else ends the word. That means 7:30 is two words (the colon splits it), 3.50 is two words, and a symbol on its own, like & or an emoji, is zero words.
Characters is the raw length of the text as JavaScript measures it, spaces and line breaks included. JavaScript counts UTF-16 code units, so most emoji and some rare characters add 2 instead of 1.
No spaces removes every whitespace character first: spaces, tabs, and line breaks.
Sentences are stretches of text that end in ., !, ?, or an ellipsis character. A run like ?! or ... closes one sentence, not three. Trailing text with no end punctuation is not counted, but the minimum reported is always 1.
Paragraphs are blocks separated by at least one blank line. Single line breaks do not start a new paragraph.
Lines counts every line break plus one, including a break at the very end of the text.
Reading and speaking time divide the word count by 238 and 130 words per minute, round to the nearest second, and show minutes plus seconds once the total reaches a minute.

A worked example

Suppose you paste this short note, with a blank line between the two paragraphs and no line break after the last word:

The café's well-known owner, Zoë, opened at 7:30 a.m. today!

She sold 120 croissants. Not bad.

Pressing Count gives:

words          18
characters     95
no spaces      79
sentences      5
paragraphs     2
lines          3
reading time   5 sec   (238 wpm, avg silent reading)
speaking time  8 sec   (130 wpm, presentation pace)

A few details are worth reading closely. café's, well-known, and Zoë each count as one word, while 7:30 counts as two and a.m. also counts as two (a and m). The sentence count is 5 rather than 3 because each period in a.m. closes a sentence. The blank line is the third line, which is why the line count is 3 for a two-paragraph note.

Common problems and how to fix them

The word count is higher than your word processor's

Times, prices, decimals, and version numbers split at their punctuation here, so v2.4.1 is three words and $19.99 is two. Word processors often treat those as single words. If you are close to a hard limit, check how the grader or publisher counts, and trim a little extra margin rather than arguing about 7:30.

Dashes change the count

A hyphen inside a word keeps it together, but a spaced dash does not. twenty-one is one word. If you write two phrases joined by a hyphen with no spaces, such as done-and-dusted, that is also one word. Put spaces around a dash used as punctuation and the words on either side count separately.

The line count is one more than you expected

Text copied from a file or an editor often ends with a line break. That final break creates an empty last line, and it is counted. Delete the trailing newline before counting if the line number matters, for instance when matching a limit on a form that counts lines.

Paragraphs are not being separated

Only a blank line starts a new paragraph. Text pasted from some web pages or PDFs arrives with single line breaks between paragraphs, so the whole thing counts as one. Add an empty line between blocks, or accept the count as an estimate.

Character limits on social platforms do not match

The characters row counts UTF-16 units, so a post with emoji can read higher here than on a platform that counts each emoji as one character, or lower than on one that weights certain characters double. Use this number as a close guide and confirm in the platform's own composer before you publish.

Related tasks

To compare two drafts of the same piece line by line, use the text diff checker. If you need filler text of a known size for a layout, generate it with the lorem ipsum generator and count it here.

Questions this tool gets asked

How is a word counted?

A word is any run of letters or digits, including apostrophes and internal hyphens, matched with Unicode-aware rules. So “don't” is one word, “well-known” is one word, and words in non-Latin scripts count correctly.

How accurate is the sentence count?

Sentences are counted by terminal punctuation (. ! ? …). Abbreviations like “e.g.” can inflate the count slightly, which is true of every counter that does not do full linguistic parsing. Treat it as a close estimate.

Where do the reading and speaking speeds come from?

Reading time assumes 238 words per minute, the average adult silent-reading rate reported in Marc Brysbaert's 2019 meta-analysis. Speaking time assumes 130 wpm, a comfortable presentation pace. Slide your own rate up or down for dense technical text.

Does a word or character limit exist?

No hard limit. The counter handles book-length manuscripts; very large texts simply take a moment longer, all still inside your browser.