Word & Character Counter

What this word counter does

As you type or paste, the panel on the right shows words, characters with and without spaces, sentences, paragraphs and lines, plus an estimated reading time and speaking time. Below that, the most frequent terms are listed so you can spot repetition before an editor does. Nothing is uploaded: the counting runs in your browser, so drafts of essays, cover letters, contracts or private notes stay on your machine.

The counter is script-aware. English, French, German, Spanish and other space-separated languages are counted by words; Chinese, Japanese kana and kanji, and Korean hangul are counted one character per word, which is how word limits are actually applied for those languages. Mixed text — a Chinese paragraph quoting an English product name — adds both correctly. Numbers, hyphenated words (well-known) and contractions (don't) each count as one word.

How to use it

Type directly, paste from a document, or use File to load a .txt, .md, .csv or .html file. The big number is the word count; the table gives the rest. Copy stats puts all figures on the clipboard in one block for pasting into a submission form or an email. Clear resets everything. There is no length limit beyond your browser's memory — a whole book manuscript counts in well under a second.

Reading time assumes 200 words per minute for alphabetic text and 350 characters per minute for Chinese, which is the average silent reading speed of an adult; speaking time uses 130 words and 200 characters per minute, the pace of a clear presentation. Use the speaking figure to size a talk or a video script, and the reading figure for blog posts and newsletters.

Where counts differ between tools

Microsoft Word, Google Docs and this page can disagree by a few words on the same text because they split tokens differently: Word treats an em dash between words as one token, Google Docs counts '3.5' as one word but some tools count two, and few tools handle Chinese at all. For a submission with a strict limit, count with the tool the recipient uses, or leave a 2% margin. Character limits for Twitter/X (280), SMS (160 GSM or 70 Unicode), meta descriptions (about 155) and Amazon titles (200) are measured in characters including spaces — the second row of the table.

Background: why word count matters

Word limits are the oldest content constraint in publishing: newspapers priced classified ads per word from the 1800s, telegrams charged by the word, and academic journals and admissions essays still set hard limits (a Common App essay is capped at 650 words). Software counters appeared with word processors in the early 1980s — WordStar and WordPerfect shipped one as a basic feature. Search engines added a new reason to count: Google's snippets truncate around 155–160 characters, and social platforms enforce fixed character caps, so writers now count both words and characters as a matter of routine.

Where it is used

Students checking an essay or thesis abstract against a limit; job seekers keeping a cover letter to one page (roughly 350–400 words); marketers writing meta descriptions, ad copy with character caps, and social posts; translators quoting by source-word count; novelists tracking daily targets (NaNoWriMo's 1,667 words a day); speakers converting a script into minutes; and developers checking string lengths for UI labels or database fields. Pair it with the Simplified ⇄ Traditional converter when preparing Chinese copy for several regions, and with the JSON formatter when the text you are measuring lives inside a localisation file. To see what changed between two drafts rather than how long they are, Text Compare marks every differing line and word.

Frequently asked questions