Word Counter
Paste or type anything and the counts update shortly after you stop — words, characters, sentences, paragraphs, and how long the text takes to read aloud or silently. Your text is counted and discarded; nothing is stored.
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Add to Chrome — freeWhat it does
- Word and character counts, updated shortly after you stop typing
- Sentence and paragraph detection
- Estimated reading and speaking time
- Nothing you paste is stored, even briefly
How to use Word Counter
- 1
Paste your text
Paste or type into the box. There is a 1,000,000-character limit; full chapters and long transcripts are well within it.
- 2
Read the counts
Words, characters, sentences, paragraphs, and time estimates update shortly after you stop typing.
- 3
Check the timing estimate
Use the reading figure for text people will read silently, and the speaking figure for anything you will say out loud.
- 4
Copy or clear
Copy the text back to your clipboard, or clear the box to start again. Nothing you typed was ever stored, so there is nothing left behind either way.
How it works
Every count is derived from the same string in a single pass, recalculated a moment after you stop typing.
Words come from splitting the trimmed text on any run of whitespace and discarding empty results. This is the same rule word processors use, which is why the number here should match what your editor reports.
Characters are counted twice: once as the raw string length, and once with all whitespace removed. Both matter — social platforms and database fields usually count everything, whereas typography and design briefs often care only about visible glyphs.
Sentences are detected by scanning for terminal punctuation — a period,
question mark, or exclamation mark, including their full-width CJK equivalents —
and allowing for runs like ?! and trailing quotes or brackets. This is a
heuristic, not a parser. An abbreviation such as "Dr. Smith" will be read as a
sentence boundary, so treat the sentence count as a close approximation rather
than an exact figure.
Paragraphs are blocks separated by at least one blank line. A single line break inside a block does not start a new paragraph, matching how Markdown and most word processors behave.
Time estimates divide the word count by a reading rate. Silent reading uses 238 words per minute and speaking uses 130. Both figures come from published averages for adult English speakers; neither adapts to your text's difficulty, which is why they are labeled as estimates.
When you'd use this
The obvious case is a hard limit — a 500-word application essay, a 2,000-word assignment, a 280-character post. Seeing the count update live is faster than writing, submitting, and being told you are over.
The less obvious case is timing. If you are writing something that will be spoken — a talk, a video script, a wedding speech — the word count is a poor proxy for length but the speaking estimate is a good one. A five-minute slot is roughly 650 words at a normal presenting pace, and most people discover they have written twice that.
It is also useful as a quick structural check. A piece with 900 words and four paragraphs is very differently shaped from one with 900 words and thirty. The paragraph and sentence counts surface that shape without your having to read the whole thing again.
A note on privacy
Counting now happens on this site's own server rather than in your browser, which is a fair question to ask about: what does that mean for a draft contract or an unpublished manuscript? The answer is that there is no file, no database row, and no log line to worry about — the text exists only for the moment it takes this server to count it, then the request ends and it is gone. That is a stronger guarantee than a retention window; there is nothing to retain.
Examples
Checking an essay against a word limit
Sentence counting splits on terminal punctuation, so the short declarative sentences here register as four rather than one. That distinction is what makes the count useful when a brief specifies an average sentence length.
Timing a conference talk
The speaking estimate assumes 130 words per minute, which is a measured conference-presentation pace rather than a conversational one. Scale the figure up if you naturally speak faster than the room.
Frequently asked questions
Is my text kept anywhere?
No. This is different from a file-conversion tool, which has to hold your upload for a short download window — a word count produces no file at all. Your text is counted in memory on the request that sends it and discarded the instant the response is returned; nothing is written to disk, logged, or retrievable afterward.
What exactly counts as a word?
Any run of characters separated by whitespace. That means hyphenated terms like "well-known" count as one word, "New York" counts as two, and a standalone number or symbol counts as one. This matches how Microsoft Word and Google Docs count, so a figure here should agree with the count your editor or lecturer sees.
How accurate is the reading time?
It assumes 238 words per minute for silent reading, which is the mean for adult readers of English non-fiction in published research. Treat it as an estimate for planning, not a guarantee. Dense technical material reads considerably slower, and text a reader is skimming goes much faster.
Does it work for languages without spaces?
Not reliably. Chinese, Japanese, and Thai do not separate words with spaces, so the word count for text in those languages will be far too low — often reporting a whole sentence as one word. The character count remains accurate and is the more meaningful figure for those scripts.
Is there a maximum length?
1,000,000 characters, which is well beyond any manuscript, thesis, or transcript you would realistically paste in. A request over that limit is refused outright rather than silently truncated, so you would see a clear error message instead of a count that looks right but was quietly computed from only the first part of your text.
Further reading
- This Emoji Is One Character, Seven Characters and Eleven CharactersYou paste something into a field with a 280-character limit and it says you are over by nine, but you counted 271. Neither of you is wrong. There are four different reasonable answers to "how many characters is this", they disagree most on exactly the text people paste, and knowing which one a system uses tells you why it rejected you.
- Why Two Word Count Tools Give You Different NumbersWord count sounds like an objective measurement. Paste the same paragraph into Word, Google Docs, and a browser tool and you can get three different numbers. None of them is broken — they disagree about what a word is, and hyphens, numbers, and em dashes are where the disagreement lives.
- How Long Should a YouTube Description Be?The limit is 5,000 characters, which is not the useful number. The number that matters is about 150 — the amount a viewer sees before pressing "Show more". Almost every mistake people make with descriptions is a consequence of optimizing for the wrong one of those two figures.