Paste your text below and the counts appear as you type. Words, characters, characters without spaces, sentences, paragraphs and lines, plus how long it takes to read and to say out loud.
Nothing you paste leaves your browser. The counting happens on your own computer, so there is no upload, no server and nothing stored. That matters more than it sounds: people paste half finished articles, client work and private messages into word counters, and most of them post your text to somebody else’s machine to do it.
How it fits: titles, posts and messages
Words you use most
Everyday filler such as the, and, of is left out, because counting those tells you nothing.
Type something and the words you lean on most will appear here.
What each number actually counts
Counters disagree with each other more than you would expect, and it is nearly always because of these definitions. Here is exactly what this one does, so you can see whether it matches what you need.
- Words. A run of letters, digits or apostrophes. Hyphenated words count as one, so state-of-the-art is one word and not four. Don’t is one word. Two words joined by a dash with no spaces, such as one–two, count as two, because that is a typed dash rather than a hyphenated word.
- Characters. Everything, spaces and line breaks included. Emoji count as one character each, which is what a person expects and what several counters get wrong by counting them as two.
- Characters without spaces. The same count with every space, tab and line break removed.
- Sentences. Anything ending in a full stop, question mark or exclamation mark. Repeated marks count once, so Really?! is one sentence.
- Paragraphs. Blocks separated by a blank line. A single line break inside a paragraph does not start a new one.
- Lines. Every line break, whether or not the line has anything on it.
One honest limit. Sentence counting will over count where a full stop is not the end of a sentence, such as in Dr. Khan or 3.5 kg. Every counter has this problem, including the one in Word, because telling the two apart properly needs to understand the language rather than the punctuation. If your text is full of abbreviations, treat the sentence number as close rather than exact.
Why it says a different number from Microsoft Word
If you have compared two counters and got two answers, this is why, and neither of them is broken.
Word counts a hyphenated word as one, the same as this tool does. It counts numbers as words. It does not count text inside footnotes unless you ask it to. Google Docs counts hyphenated words as one as well, but treats some symbols differently.
The gap is almost always hyphens, numbers, or something invisible you pasted along with the text. If two counters differ by a lot, paste the text into a plain text editor first and copy it back out, which strips the formatting that is confusing one of them.
The reading and speaking times
Reading time is worked out at 238 words a minute and speaking time at 140. Those two figures come from published reading rate research on silent reading of ordinary prose and on speech, rather than from a round number somebody picked.
They are averages, so treat them as a guide. A technical document is read more slowly than a blog post. A nervous presenter speaks faster than 140. If you are timing a talk, read it aloud with a stopwatch once and use your own rate, because it will be more accurate than any average.
The length limits it checks against
Each bar fills as you type and turns red when you go over. These are the real published limits, not rules of thumb.
- Search result title, 60 characters. Not a hard limit. Search engines measure the width in pixels rather than counting letters, so a title full of wide letters is cut sooner and one full of narrow ones survives longer. 60 is the point past which most titles start being trimmed.
- Search result description, 160 characters. Same idea, same caveat. Search engines also rewrite descriptions when they feel like it, so treat this as a target rather than a promise.
- X post, 280 characters. A hard limit for most accounts. Links are counted as a fixed length however long they are.
- One SMS, 160 characters. Go over and the message is split and charged as more than one. Using any character outside the basic set, including most emoji and many accented letters, drops the limit to 70.
- LinkedIn post, 3,000 characters. A hard limit, though only the first two lines or so show before the “see more” link.
- Instagram caption, 2,200 characters. A hard limit, and again only the first line or two are visible without tapping.
The most used words list
This shows which words you lean on, with everyday filler such as the, and and of left out because counting those tells you nothing. Words shorter than three letters are skipped for the same reason.
It is useful for two different jobs. If you are writing, it shows the word you have used eleven times without noticing. If you are writing for search, it shows roughly how heavily a page leans on its subject.
A word of caution on that second use. There is no correct keyword density and there has not been for many years. Anyone who tells you to aim for a particular percentage is repeating advice that stopped being true a long time ago. Use this to spot repetition that reads badly, not to hit a number.
Frequently asked questions
Is my text sent anywhere?
No. The counting runs in your browser and there is no upload of any kind. You can check that yourself: open your browser’s developer tools, go to the Network tab, and type into the box. Nothing is sent. You can also disconnect from the internet and the tool keeps working.
Is there a size limit?
No fixed one. Because it runs on your own computer, the limit is your computer. A whole novel will work, though on a slow machine you may see a small pause between typing and the numbers updating.
Does it count words in other languages?
Yes for any language that puts spaces between words, including accented and non Latin alphabets. It will not be right for Chinese, Japanese or Thai, which do not separate words with spaces. Splitting those properly needs a dictionary of the language, and this tool does not have one. I would rather say so than give you a number that looks confident and is wrong.
Do you save what I paste?
There is nowhere to save it to. The text never leaves the page, and closing the tab loses it. If you are working on something long, keep it somewhere else and paste a copy in here.
If you have any issues, you can ask me via comment, and I will love to help you out.