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Word Counter

Paste an essay, article or caption and get words, characters, sentences, paragraphs, reading time and the most used words instantly.

Processed locally in your browser

Options
Counts update as you type. Nothing leaves your browser.0 chars · 0 lines
The result will appear here.

What is Word Counter?

A word counter measures the size of a text the way writers, students and editors need it: number of words, characters with and without spaces, sentences, paragraphs and lines, plus the average word length.

This one is Unicode aware. It keeps "don’t", "well-known" and "3.14" as single words, counts an emoji as one character, and uses the browser dictionary (Intl.Segmenter) to split Chinese, Japanese and Thai. It also estimates reading time at 200 words per minute and speaking time at 130, and lists your ten most frequent words.

How does it work?

  1. Type or paste your text; every figure updates as you type.
  2. Read the statistics table: words, characters, sentences, paragraphs, lines, average word length, reading and speaking time.
  3. Tick "ignore common words" to make the top-10 table show meaningful keywords instead of "the" and "of".

Common use cases

  • Checking that an essay or blog post respects a required word range.
  • Estimating how long a speech, video script or podcast intro will take to read aloud.
  • Spotting overused words in a draft with the top-10 frequency table.
  • Counting words in a translation quote before sending it to a client.

Examples

Try this input in the tool above:

Input
The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog. The dog sleeps; the fox runs away!

Café au lait costs 3.50 € — naïve users love 😀 emoji, don’t they?
Output
Words: 27
Characters (with spaces): 146
Characters (without spaces): 116
Sentences: 3
Paragraphs: 2
Lines: 3
Average word length: 4.0
Reading time (200 wpm): 8 s
Speaking time (130 wpm): 12 s

Privacy

Word Counter runs entirely in your browser. The text or files you provide are processed on your device and are not uploaded, logged or stored on our servers.

Limitations

Word counts differ slightly between tools because each has its own rule for hyphens and punctuation. For Chinese, Japanese and Thai the count is an estimate.

Frequently asked questions

Does an emoji count as a word or a character?

An emoji counts as one character (even family or skin-tone sequences) and is never counted as a word.

How is reading time calculated?

It divides the word count by 200 words per minute, an average adult silent-reading speed. Speaking time uses 130 words per minute.

Is my text uploaded anywhere?

No. Everything is computed locally in your browser; the text never leaves your device.

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