Word Counter
Count characters, words, sentences, and paragraphs in your text, entirely in your browser.
Start typing to see statistics.
What counts as a "word" differs by script. Latin-alphabet text is split on whitespace and hyphens, so "well-known" counts as one word. Chinese, Japanese, and Korean text has no spaces between words, so this tool counts each CJK character individually instead, which is the convention most word processors use for those languages.
Reading time is estimated at 200 words per minute, a figure widely cited in readability research for adults reading silently in their native language. It is a useful approximation, not a precise measurement, since actual reading speed varies with text difficulty and familiarity.
Sentence and paragraph counts follow simple heuristics: a sentence ends at a period, exclamation mark, or question mark followed by whitespace, and a paragraph ends at a blank line. These rules can misfire on abbreviations like "e.g." or on nested quotations, so treat the sentence and paragraph totals as close estimates rather than exact linguistic counts.
Common uses
- Checking that an essay or application response stays within a strict word limit before submitting it, since many forms and journals enforce hard caps.
- Estimating a fair price for freelance writing work that is billed per word, by pasting a draft and reading off the exact word count.
Frequently asked questions
- Does it count Chinese and Japanese characters correctly?
- Yes—each CJK character is counted individually as one word, since these scripts do not use spaces between words the way Latin-alphabet languages do.
- How is reading time estimated?
- The word count is divided by 200, a commonly cited average silent reading speed, and rounded up to the nearest whole minute.
- Is my text uploaded to a server?
- No. Every statistic is computed locally in your browser as you type; the text is never sent over the network.