Word Counter

About the Word Counter

This word counter shows the length of a text while you write or paste it: words, characters with and without spaces, sentences, paragraphs, lines and the size in UTF-8 bytes. It also estimates how long the text takes to read or to say out loud and lists the words you use most often.

It is handy for essays and assignments with a word limit, for checking that a title, meta description or social media post fits a character budget, and for spotting words you repeat too often. You can set your own character or word limit and watch the remaining count.

Counting is done with the Unicode text segmentation built into your browser (Intl.Segmenter), so an emoji with a skin tone or an accented letter counts as one character, and Chinese and Japanese text, which has no spaces, is still split into words. The text never leaves your device.

How to use it

1. Type or paste your text into the "Your text" box.
2. Read the counts in the tiles below the box; they update as you type.
3. To check a length budget, choose Characters or Words under "Limit" and enter the maximum. The bar and the remaining count show how close you are.
4. Look at "Most frequent words" to find repetitions. Tick "Include common words" to also list words such as "the" and "and".
5. Use "Copy text" to copy your text, or "Clear" to start again.

Features

• Accurate character counting: Counts user-perceived characters (grapheme clusters), so emoji sequences, flags and letters with combining accents count once. A Windows line break (CR LF) counts as one character.
• Language-aware word counting: Words are found with Unicode word boundaries: punctuation and emoji are not words, contractions such as "don't" and numbers such as "3.14" are one word, and hyphenated words such as "well-known" count once.
• Reading and speaking time: Estimates are based on 238 words per minute for silent reading (the average for English non-fiction found by Brysbaert, 2019) and about 140 words per minute for speaking.
• Custom limit: Set a character or word limit and see the remaining count, a progress bar and a clear warning when you go over.
• Frequent words: Lists the 15 most used words, case-insensitive, with their count and share of all words. Common English words are hidden unless you include them.
• Handles long texts: Very long texts (more than 20,000 characters) are recounted shortly after you stop typing, so the editor stays responsive.

Examples

Limitations and notes

• Word counts can differ slightly from Microsoft Word, Google Docs and other tools, because each one has its own rules for hyphens, numbers, symbols and URLs.
• Sentence detection follows Unicode rules and does not know abbreviations, so "Mr. Smith" may be counted as two sentences.
• A paragraph is any line that contains text. Text with hard line breaks inside paragraphs (for example copied from an email) is counted as more paragraphs.
• Words in Chinese, Japanese and Thai are found with the dictionary of your browser, so the count can differ between browsers. In browsers without Intl.Segmenter each Chinese or Japanese character counts as one word.
• Reading and speaking times are averages for English. Actual speed depends on the reader, the language and the difficulty of the text.
• Social networks and other platforms may count characters differently (for example links or emoji), so check their own rules for exact limits.

Frequently asked questions