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Word Counter

Paste or type any text to instantly count words, characters, sentences, paragraphs and reading time. Everything stays local.

How Word Counter works

The word counter updates as you type, showing word count, character count with spaces, character count without spaces, sentence count, paragraph count and an estimated reading time. There is no submit button; all six metrics recalculate on every keystroke. The text you type stays in the browser tab; it is never sent to a remote service, which is verifiable by watching the Network tab in DevTools while you type.

Word boundaries follow Unicode word-break rules, so contractions like "don't" count as one word and hyphenated compounds like "well-known" count as one word. Sentence boundaries are detected by terminal punctuation (period, exclamation mark or question mark) followed by whitespace and an uppercase letter or end of text. Reading time is estimated at 200 words per minute, a common approximation for adult reading speed on screen.

Written by Bastien Sulyan

How to use Word Counter, step by step

  1. Click inside the text area and start typing or paste your text.
  2. Read the live metrics in the panel beside or below the text area.
  3. Edit the text to see counts update in real time.
  4. Use the character-without-spaces count for platforms with character limits that exclude spaces.

Common use cases

  • Check that a blog post draft meets a minimum word count requirement before publishing it to a CMS.
  • Verify that a meta description stays under 160 characters using the character-with-spaces count.
  • Estimate how long a presentation script will take to deliver using the reading-time metric before a timed rehearsal.
  • Count the words in a translated segment to compare against the source segment length during a localization quality check.

Frequently asked questions

Does the tool send my text to a server as I type?

No. Every metric is computed by a few lines of JavaScript that run in this browser tab on each input event. Your text is never transmitted anywhere. You can confirm this by opening the Network panel in your browser DevTools and typing: the panel remains silent.

How is "word" defined?

A word is any sequence of alphanumeric or apostrophe characters separated by whitespace or punctuation. "don't" is one word, "well-known" is one word (hyphen treated as a separator), and a bare number like "42" is one word.

How is reading time estimated?

By dividing the word count by 200, which is a common approximation for average adult reading speed on a screen. The result is rounded to the nearest minute, with a minimum display of "less than a minute" for very short texts.

Does the tool count characters in languages without spaces, like Chinese or Japanese?

Character counts follow the browser string length, which counts UTF-16 code units. Letters and CJK ideographs in the Basic Multilingual Plane count as one; emoji and rarer characters outside it count as two, so a string of five emoji reports ten. Word count is less meaningful for languages that do not use spaces as word separators; treat the character count as the primary metric for those.

Can I count words in a pasted PDF or Word document?

Only if you first copy the text content from the document and paste it here as plain text. The word counter works on raw text; it cannot parse binary file formats directly.