Word & Character Counter
Count words, characters, sentences and paragraphs, with reading and speaking time. Hyphenated words count once and an emoji counts as one character.
Words 32
Characters 180
Characters without spaces 148
Sentences 3
Paragraphs 2
Words per sentence 10.7
Longest word well-known (10)
Reading time 9 sec at 225 words a minute
Speaking time 15 sec at 130 words a minuteOutput is valid and updates as you type.
Fix the highlighted fields to update the output.
Count what is actually in a piece of text: words, characters, sentences, paragraphs, and how long it takes to read or say.
How to use
- Paste or type the text. Counts update as you type, and nothing is uploaded.
- Read the word count first. Hyphenated words count once, contractions count once, and a number with separators counts once.
- Use the character counts for limits. Characters without spaces is what most character limits mean; characters with spaces is what a meta description counts.
- Set a word limit if you are writing to one. The output says how many words you have left, or how far over you are.
- Treat reading time as a rough figure: it is the word count divided by a reading speed, and speeds vary widely.
Example
Words 12
Characters 74
Characters without spaces 63
Sentences 3
Paragraphs 2
Words per sentence 4
Longest word well-known (10)
Reading time 3 sec at 225 words a minute
Speaking time 6 sec at 130 words a minuteWords per sentence is the number worth watching. Anything much over twenty-five is a sentence most readers have to read twice.
Pitfalls
- Every tool counts words slightly differently.
well-knownis one word here and two in some editors;it'sis one here and occasionally two elsewhere. Compare like with like when you are writing to a limit. - Characters are counted as code points, so an emoji is one character. A database column measured in bytes will see four, and a UTF-16 length will see two.
- Reading speed is not a constant. 225 words a minute is a fair average for adult silent reading; technical text is slower and skimming is much faster.
- Speaking time at 130 words a minute is a presentation pace. A conversational read is faster, a keynote is slower, and reading from a script always takes longer than you expect.
- Sentence counting is a heuristic. Abbreviations like
Dr.and decimals like3.5are handled, but an unusual abbreviation will still split a sentence in two. - A single line break is not always a paragraph. When the text has blank lines, those separate paragraphs; when it has none, each line counts as one.
- Word counts for SEO are a weak signal at best. Length correlates with depth, and neither is a ranking factor on its own.
- Pasting from a word processor brings invisible characters with it, including non-breaking spaces. They count as characters, which is sometimes the difference you are looking for.
Compatibility
Word splitting uses Unicode letter and number properties, so Latin, Greek, Cyrillic and accented text all count correctly. Character counting iterates code points rather than UTF-16 units, which is what makes an emoji one character. Everything runs in your browser, in any version from 2018 onwards, and nothing is uploaded.