How to use the word counter
Type or paste your text into the box. The counts update as you type, so there is no button to press. Use Clear to empty the box and start again. You can paste up to 200,000 characters at once, which is enough for a long report or several chapters. If the text is longer, you will see a message asking you to count it in parts.
Your text stays private
All counting happens in your browser. The text is never sent to our server or anywhere else, and it is not saved. When you close or reload the page, it is gone.
What is counted
- Words: runs of letters or digits. Contractions such as "don't" and numbers such as 3.14 count as one word. Hyphenated words like "well-known" count as two.
- Characters: every visible character, including spaces and line breaks. Where your browser supports it, characters are counted the way people see them, so an accented letter or an emoji with a skin tone counts as one.
- Characters without spaces: the same count with spaces, tabs and line breaks removed.
- Sentences: text ending in a full stop, question mark or exclamation mark. A line break also ends a sentence, so headings and list items are counted too.
- Paragraphs: every line that contains text. Empty lines are ignored, so it does not matter whether you leave one or two line breaks between paragraphs.
Reading and speaking time
Reading time assumes an average silent reading speed of 238 words per minute, and speaking time assumes 130 words per minute, a relaxed pace for a talk or presentation.
Worked example
A 476-word blog post takes 476 ÷ 238 = 2 minutes to read. Read aloud, it takes 476 ÷ 130 ≈ 3.66 minutes, shown as 3 min 40 sec.
Top 10 words
The details panel lists the ten words you use most often, with how many times each appears and its share of all words. Common filler words such as "the", "and", "of" and "is" are left out, as are numbers on their own, so the list shows the words that carry your topic. Capital letters are ignored, so "Fox" and "fox" are counted together. This is handy for spotting words you repeat too often.
Good to know
- Different tools count slightly differently, especially for hyphens, abbreviations like "Dr." and text in languages that do not use spaces. Small differences are normal.
- Character limits on social media and forms may count some symbols or line breaks differently from this tool.
- Reading speed varies a lot from person to person and with how difficult the text is, so treat the times as estimates.