Word Counter
Paste or type your text and see the word count update instantly, along with characters, sentences, paragraphs, reading time and how it measures against common platform limits.
Counts update as you type. Nothing is uploaded.
Against common limits
- SEO title0 / 60
- Meta description0 / 160
- X / Twitter post0 / 280
- LinkedIn post0 / 3,000
How to use the word counter
- Type or paste your text into the box above. There is no upload step and no button to press — counts appear as soon as there is text to count.
- Read the counts. Words, characters, sentences, paragraphs and lines update on every keystroke, alongside estimated reading and speaking time.
- Check against a limit. The bars underneath compare your character count against common platform limits — SEO titles, meta descriptions, social posts — and turn red with an overage figure once you exceed one.
- Copy or clear. Copy returns your text unchanged; Clear empties the box. Neither sends anything anywhere.
Your text stays in the page. Refreshing or closing the tab discards it, so copy anything you want to keep before you navigate away.
When you would need a word counter
Meeting a hard limit. University essays, grant applications, journal submissions and competition entries usually specify a word count with a tolerance, and exceeding it can mean rejection before anyone reads the work. Checking as you write is considerably less painful than cutting 400 words the night before a deadline.
Writing for search. Page titles and meta descriptions are truncated in search results — titles at roughly 60 characters, descriptions at around 160. Being cut mid-sentence with an ellipsis costs you the part of the message you most wanted read.
Posting to social platforms. Every platform truncates at a different point, and the limits are in characters rather than words. Knowing before you post is faster than discovering it in the composer.
Pricing freelance work. Writing, editing, translation and transcription are commonly quoted per word or per thousand words. An accurate count is the basis of an accurate invoice, and it also lets you sanity-check a client's stated length against the document they actually sent.
Pacing something you will read aloud. A conference talk, a wedding speech, a podcast script or a video voiceover all have a time budget rather than a word budget. The speaking time estimate converts between the two.
Working to a manuscript target. Novels, novellas and short stories have conventional length ranges that agents and publishers expect. Tracking progress against a target is easier when the number is in front of you.
Tips for getting an accurate count
Know which count your recipient uses. Different tools disagree, and the disagreements are systematic rather than random. Most word processors count hyphenated compounds as one word; some editorial style guides count them as two. Numbers, dates and standalone symbols are treated inconsistently. When a limit is tight, ask what the recipient counts with, and check in that tool.
Decide what to include before you measure. Titles, headings, footnotes, captions, reference lists and appendices are frequently excluded from academic word limits, and pasting everything in at once will overstate your count substantially. Paste only the sections that count.
Count characters, not words, for anything with a display limit. Word limits exist for human reading effort; character limits exist because of a field width or a layout constraint. If a platform states a character limit, the word count is irrelevant to whether your text will fit.
Treat reading time as a range. The 238 words-per-minute figure is an average for ordinary prose. Technical writing with unfamiliar terminology can read at half that speed, and material with tables or code that readers stop to study is slower still. For anything where the estimate matters, add a margin.
Watch what you paste in. Copying from a PDF or a formatted web page often brings hidden characters, non-breaking spaces and broken line wrapping. These can change the count slightly. If a pasted count looks implausible, paste into a plain text editor first and copy back out.
Limits and requirements
Sentence counting is approximate. As covered in the FAQ, abbreviations and decimal numbers inflate the sentence count. Prose without abbreviations counts accurately; academic or technical writing will read slightly high.
Word counting assumes spaces between words. Chinese, Japanese and Thai do not separate words with spaces, so the word figure is not meaningful for those languages. The character count is, and it is the figure those languages' publishing conventions use.
There is no file upload. This tool works on text you paste in. Counting the words inside a PDF or Word document is a separate job — extract the text first with our PDF to Text tool, then paste the result here.
Very large texts. The counter handles a full-length novel without difficulty, but re-counting on every keystroke means extremely large documents may feel slightly less responsive on older devices. Counting a few hundred thousand words at once is well within range on any current phone or laptop.
Browser support. Any modern browser released in roughly the last five years works — Chrome, Firefox, Safari and Edge on desktop and mobile. JavaScript must be enabled.
Privacy: how this tool handles your text
Everything happens on your device. When you type or paste, the text is held in your browser's memory and counted by JavaScript running locally. It is never transmitted to our servers, never written to a database, never logged, and never used for anything else.
This matters more than it might appear. Text people count is very often unpublished and sometimes confidential — a draft contract, a cover letter, a legal submission, an unreleased manuscript, an internal memo. Pasting any of those into a tool that posts to a server means handing a copy to a third party whose retention policy you have not read.
You do not have to take our word for it. Open your browser's developer tools, switch to the Network tab, and type into the box. No request carries your text, because there is nowhere for it to go. When you close the tab, it is gone.
Frequently asked questions
How does this word counter decide what counts as a word?
It splits your text on whitespace — spaces, tabs and line breaks — and counts the resulting chunks. This matches how a person counting by eye would do it, and it is the same approach Microsoft Word and Google Docs use. A hyphenated term like 'well-known' counts as one word, and a contraction like 'don't' counts as one word, because neither contains a space.
Is my text uploaded or stored anywhere?
No. The counting happens entirely inside your browser using JavaScript running on your own device. Your text is never sent to our servers, never logged, and never stored. You can verify this by opening your browser's developer tools, switching to the Network tab, and typing into the box — you will see no request carrying your text. Closing or refreshing the page clears it from memory.
How is reading time calculated?
Reading time uses 238 words per minute, which is the average silent reading speed for adults reading English prose in published research. Speaking time uses 130 words per minute, a comfortable pace for presenting aloud. Both are estimates — dense technical writing reads more slowly than narrative, and individual reading speeds vary widely.
Why does the sentence count look wrong sometimes?
Sentence detection looks for full stops, question marks and exclamation marks followed by a space or the end of the text. That works for ordinary prose but miscounts abbreviations: 'Dr. Smith arrived.' reads as two sentences rather than one. Decimal numbers and ellipses can cause the same issue. Treat the sentence count as a close approximation rather than an exact figure.
What is the difference between characters with and without spaces?
The characters figure counts every character you have typed, including spaces, tabs and line breaks. The without-spaces figure excludes all whitespace. Which one matters depends on where you are submitting: academic character limits and most publishing contracts count with spaces, while some legacy database fields and SMS-style limits count without.
Does it count words correctly in languages other than English?
For languages that separate words with spaces — Spanish, French, German, Hindi, Arabic and most others — yes, the word count is accurate. For Chinese, Japanese and Thai, which do not use spaces between words, the word count will not be meaningful. Use the character count for those languages instead, which is what their publishing conventions use anyway.
Does the tool work offline?
Once the page has loaded, yes. All the counting logic runs locally, so you can disconnect from the internet and it will keep working in that tab. You need a connection only to load the page in the first place.
Are emoji counted as one character or two?
One. Many word counters count an emoji as two characters because of how JavaScript stores text internally, which produces confusing results. This tool counts by visible character, so a single emoji counts as one, and the same applies to accented letters and non-Latin scripts.