Word counter
Characters, words, sentences, paragraphs and reading time, updated as you type, with post, SMS and meta description limits in front of you.
Drop your files here
.txt, .md · up to 5 MB
How to count words and characters
- 1
Paste or type your text
Or drop a .txt or .md file up to 5 MB. There is no button to press.
- 2
Watch the counts update
Nine numbers and four platform limits, recalculated on every keystroke.
- 3
Copy or download the stats
One click puts the report on the clipboard, one saves it as a .txt file.
Why an emoji counts as one character here and eight somewhere else
JavaScript stores text as UTF-16, and in UTF-16 a single family emoji is made of eight units. Ask most counters for the length of 👨👩👧 and they will answer eight, because that is what the language reports. A person looking at the screen sees one character, and on a platform that limits you to 280 of them the difference is not academic: it is the difference between a post that sends and one that does not. This counter walks the text by code point instead, so what it reports is what you can see. The same applies to accented letters, Hindi conjuncts and anything else built from more than one unit.
Two ways to count words, and why both are here
Splitting text on spaces is the rule almost every counter uses, and it works for English. It fails completely for Chinese and Japanese, which do not put spaces between words: a full page comes out as one word. It also splits don't into two and по-русски into two. The default here uses the browser's own segmenter, which knows where words begin and end in the language of the page, so Chinese is counted properly and contractions stay whole. The second rule, counting by spaces, is kept deliberately: sometimes you need the number your word processor will show, not the correct one, because that is the number in the brief.
Sentences, paragraphs and the abbreviations that break them
A sentence ends at a full stop, a question mark or an exclamation mark, except when it does not. Dr. Smith is one sentence, not two, and so is a price of $3.50. Twenty-four common abbreviations and decimal numbers are treated as part of the sentence they sit in, which is why the sentence count here can differ from the one your word processor shows. Paragraphs are blocks separated by a blank line; when a text has no blank lines at all, every non-empty line is counted as its own paragraph, because otherwise a forty-screen document would report a single paragraph.
Reading time is an estimate, and you can change it
Reading time is words divided by a reading speed, and the speed most tools hard-code is 200 to 250 words a minute for silent reading of ordinary prose. Dense technical writing is slower, a familiar newsletter is faster, and reading aloud is slower still, around 130 words a minute, which is why speaking time is calculated separately. Both speeds are settings rather than constants: if you know your own pace, or your podcast host's, put it in and the numbers become useful instead of decorative.
Your text stays in this tab
Counting happens in your browser, in the page you already have open. Nothing is uploaded, nothing is stored, and there is no server involved at any point; you can disconnect from the network and the counter keeps working. Close the tab and the text is gone, including from us, because it was never anywhere else.
Frequently asked questions
How are words counted in Chinese and Japanese?
By the browser's built-in text segmenter, which knows where words begin and end without relying on spaces. Counting by spaces would report a whole page of Chinese as a single word. You can switch to the space rule in the settings if you specifically need the number a word processor would show.
Are spaces included in the character count?
Both numbers are shown: characters with spaces and characters without. The platform limits at the bottom use the count with spaces by default, because that is how X, SMS and search engines measure, but you can switch that off.
Where does the reading time come from?
Words divided by the reading speed setting, which defaults to 200 words a minute for silent reading and 130 for reading aloud. Both are adjustable, and durations under a minute are shown in seconds rather than rounded up to a meaningless 1 min.
Is my text sent to a server?
No. Everything runs in your browser. There is no upload, no storage and no account, and the page keeps working with the network disconnected.
How long a text can it handle?
A file of up to 5 MB or a million characters of pasted text. Beyond that the counter works on the first million characters and says so, rather than freezing the tab.
Why does the sentence count differ from Word?
Because abbreviations and decimal numbers are handled here: Dr. Smith and $3.50 stay inside their sentence instead of ending it. Word splits on the full stop alone, which inflates the count on any text with initials, titles or prices.
Does it work offline?
Yes. The page has no dependencies to download and no requests to make, so once it is open it works with no connection at all.
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