What is Word Counter?
Word Counter is a free online tool that helps you count words, characters, sentences, and paragraphs in your text. Whether you're a student working on an essay, a writer drafting a novel, or a professional preparing a report, it counts as you type. Your text stays in your browser and is never uploaded.
Key Features
- Word Count: Get an accurate count of all words in your text
- Character Count: See total characters with and without spaces
- Reading Time: Estimate how long it takes to read your text silently (238 words per minute, the average adult reading speed for non-fiction found in a 2019 meta-analysis by Marc Brysbaert)
- Speaking Time: Estimate how long it takes to read your text aloud at a relaxed presentation pace of 130 words per minute
- Keyword Density: See your 10 most frequent words (common words like "the" and "and" are skipped) and what share of the text each one makes up
- Text Analysis: View sentence count, paragraph count, and unique word count
Why Use a Word Counter?
Word counters are essential tools for anyone working with text. They help you:
- Meet specific word count requirements for essays, articles, and assignments
- Optimize content length for SEO and social media platforms
- Track your writing progress and productivity
- Analyze writing patterns and improve your style
- Ensure consistency across multiple documents
How Words, Sentences and Paragraphs Are Counted
- Words: anything separated by spaces or line breaks that contains at least one letter or digit, the same way Microsoft Word counts. "Don't", "well-known" and "3.5" are one word each; a lone dash or "&" is not a word. Chinese and Japanese characters are counted one per character.
- Characters: every character you can see, including spaces and line breaks. An emoji or an accented letter counts as one character.
- Sentences: text ending in a full stop, question mark, exclamation mark or ellipsis. Abbreviations such as "Mr.", "Dr." and "e.g." do not end a sentence, and a last line without punctuation still counts.
- Paragraphs: every non-empty line, as in Microsoft Word.
Different programs can disagree by a few words on hyphens, numbers and web addresses. See the word count guide for how strict word limits are and what usually counts toward them.
How to Use
Using our word counter is simple: just type or paste your text into the text area above. The statistics update in real-time as you type, giving you instant feedback on your text metrics. Your text is saved in your browser so it is still there if you reload the page; click Clear to remove it.
Need to know how many pages your text will fill? Try the words per page calculator.