Count words, characters, sentences, and paragraphs instantly. Free word counter with reading time. Runs in your browser. Free, private, in-browser.
This free word counter instantly analyzes your text and shows you the word count, character count (with and without spaces), sentence count, paragraph count, line count, and estimated reading and speaking times. Just paste or type your text and see the results update in real-time.
Word count requirements are everywhere. Here are common scenarios where this tool helps:
Paste or type your text in the input area, and statistics are calculated instantly as you type. The tool uses standard text analysis algorithms to count words (separated by whitespace), characters, sentences (ending in . ! or ?), and paragraphs (separated by blank lines). Reading time is based on 200 words per minute; speaking time on 150 words per minute.
Students checking essay length. Writers tracking article word counts. Social media managers crafting posts. Researchers meeting journal requirements. Job seekers polishing resumes and cover letters. Speakers timing presentations. Translators tracking source text length.
Words: Text separated by spaces, tabs, or line breaks. "Hello world" = 2 words.
Characters: Every letter, number, symbol, and space. Useful for character-limited platforms.
Characters (no spaces): Same as above but excluding all whitespace characters.
Sentences: Determined by sentence-ending punctuation marks.
Paragraphs: Text blocks separated by blank lines.
Reading time: Minutes needed at average reading speed (200 wpm).
Speaking time: Minutes needed at average speaking pace (150 wpm).
No uploads, no server requests. The tool counts and analyzes text entirely within your browser. Ideal for confidential drafts, academic work, or anything you'd rather not share with a server.
A word count is only useful when you know what number you are aiming for. University essays usually state an explicit range and allow a 10% margin either side, which means a 2,000-word essay is normally safe anywhere between 1,800 and 2,200 words. Journal abstracts are stricter: 150 words for many medical journals, 250 for most social-science titles, and a hard cut at 300 for conference submissions. Portals often reject anything over the limit automatically, so check before you upload rather than after.
For web writing the numbers behave differently. A product or tool page does its job in 600 to 900 words if every sentence answers a real question. A guide that competes for an informational query usually needs 1,500 to 2,500 words because it must cover the follow-up questions readers ask next. Padding a short page to reach an arbitrary number is counter-productive — length only helps when it adds information a reader would otherwise search for elsewhere.
Business writing rewards restraint. A cover letter works best between 250 and 400 words. An executive summary should stay on one page, roughly 350 words. A LinkedIn post loses reach past about 200 words because the platform truncates it behind a "see more" link. Email subject lines are measured in characters, not words, which is why the character counts on this page matter as much as the word count.
Word count answers "how long is this to read?" Character count answers "will this fit?" Anything with a hard technical cap is measured in characters: 280 for a post on X, 160 for a single SMS segment (70 if the message contains emoji or non-Latin script), around 60 for a search-result title, and roughly 155 for a meta description before truncation. If you are writing for one of those slots, watch the character figure and ignore the word figure entirely.
Characters-without-spaces exists for a specific professional reason. Translation and transcription work is frequently billed per 1,000 characters excluding spaces, because that measure is more stable across languages than a word count. German compounds and Finnish agglutination produce far fewer words for the same content than English does, so a per-word rate would quietly underpay the translator.
Reading time here uses 200 words per minute, a conservative average for adults reading non-fiction on a screen. Silent reading of simple prose can reach 250 to 300 words per minute; dense technical or legal text drops to 100 to 150 because readers re-read clauses. Treat the estimate as a planning figure, not a measurement — a 10-minute article for a general audience may genuinely take 18 minutes if it is full of formulas or code.
Speaking time uses 150 words per minute, which matches an unhurried presentation pace. Audiobook narration sits near 155, conversational podcasting near 170, and a nervous speaker reading from a script can exceed 200 words per minute without noticing. When you are timing a talk, write to roughly 130 words per minute instead: the gap absorbs pauses, slide changes, and the questions that interrupt you. A five-minute lightning talk therefore needs about 650 words of script, not 750.
When you need to cut, attack structure before vocabulary. Delete whole sentences that restate the previous one, collapse a two-sentence introduction into one, and remove any paragraph that exists only to announce what the next paragraph will say. That usually recovers more words than a hundred small substitutions.
After that, look for the predictable padding: "in order to" becomes "to", "due to the fact that" becomes "because", "it is important to note that" simply disappears, and "there are several factors that affect" becomes "several factors affect". Converting passive constructions to active voice typically saves two or three words per sentence and reads better in the process. Check the count after each pass so you know which edits actually moved the number.
If you need to expand rather than trim, add evidence instead of adjectives: a concrete example, a number, a counter-argument, or a short account of what goes wrong when the advice is ignored. Readers and search engines both reward specifics; neither rewards a longer way of saying the same thing.
Whitespace-based word counting works well for English, Spanish, French, German, and most European languages. It is unreliable for Chinese, Japanese, and Thai, which do not separate words with spaces — a 500-character Chinese passage may register as a single word. For those scripts, use the character count as your working measure; publishers in those languages normally specify character limits for exactly this reason.
Arabic and Hebrew count normally because they use spaces, but bear in mind that right-to-left text mixed with Latin names and numbers can introduce invisible direction-marking characters that raise the character count slightly. If a form rejects text that looks short enough, an invisible character is a likely culprit.
Unpublished text is sensitive more often than people assume: a thesis under examination, a contract draft, a medical case write-up, an unannounced product page. Any counter that sends your text to a server creates a copy you no longer control and cannot audit. This tool performs every calculation in your browser's memory, so the text never leaves the device. You can confirm it yourself by opening your browser's network panel and typing into the box — no request is sent. Nothing is cached, logged, or retained after you close the tab.
Need to clean up your text first? Try our Remove Duplicate Lines tool. For an exact character breakdown use the Letter Counter, check structure with the Sentence Counter, or measure clarity with the Readability Score Checker. Working with data? Check out our JSON to CSV Converter.
Words are counted by splitting text on whitespace (spaces, tabs, newlines). Hyphenated words like 'well-known' count as one word.
Sentences are detected by periods, exclamation marks, and question marks. Multiple punctuation (like '...') is counted as one sentence ending.
Reading time is based on an average reading speed of 200 words per minute, which is typical for adult readers.
No. Everything runs in your browser. We have no way to access or save your content.
Yes! The tool works with any language including Chinese, Japanese, Arabic, and emoji. Each character is counted individually.
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