Word counter
Type or paste your text to count its words and characters. The counts update as you type: characters with and without spaces, letters, sentences, paragraphs, reading time and the words you use most. Your text stays in this browser.
Typed or pasted text, .txt and .md files up to 5 MB
- Words
- 0
- Characters
- 0
- Characters without spaces
- 0
Type or paste text, drop a .txt or .md file here, or open one. Nothing is uploaded.
- Letters
- 0
- Sentences
- 0
- Paragraphs
- 0
- Lines
- 0
- Reading time
- 0
- Speaking time
- 0
Enter a limit to see how much room is left.
Top words
| Word | Times | Share of words |
|---|
The words you use most will appear here.
How it works
Everything is counted in this browser tab as you type, and nothing is sent anywhere. The text is gone when you close the tab.
What counts as a word
A word is anything between spaces that contains a letter or a digit. Contractions like don't and hyphenated words like well-known count as one word, while a dash or an ampersand on its own isn't a word. Chinese, Japanese and Thai are written without spaces, so for those the browser's built-in dictionary finds where each word ends.
Word processors and websites don't all follow the same rules, so another counter can differ by a few words, mostly around dashes, slashes and numbers. When a form or an application sets a word limit, its own counter is the one that decides.
Characters with and without spaces
Characters counts everything in the box, including spaces and line breaks. Characters without spaces leaves out spaces, tabs and line breaks. Letters counts letters only, so digits, punctuation and emoji are left out.
A character is counted the way you see it: é, 👍🏽 and 🇯🇵 are one character each. Some websites and databases count the code units underneath instead, and there a single emoji can use up 2 or more characters of a limit.
Sentences, paragraphs and lines
A sentence ends with a full stop, a question mark or an exclamation mark, or at the end of a line, so a heading on its own line counts as one. An abbreviation followed by a capital letter, as in “Dr. Smith”, is counted as the end of a sentence. A paragraph is a line with text on it, and the blank lines between paragraphs don't count. Lines counts every line up to the last one with text, blank lines included.
Reading and speaking time
Reading time assumes 238 words a minute and speaking time 183 words a minute: the averages for silent reading of non-fiction and for reading aloud in a 2019 review of 190 studies by Marc Brysbaert. Chinese and Japanese are timed by character instead, at 500 characters a minute for reading and 300 for speaking. People read at very different speeds, so treat both times as a rough guide.
Top words and keyword density
Top words lists the words you use most, how many times each one appears and its share of all your words, which SEO tools call keyword density. Choose 2-word or 3-word phrases to find phrases you repeat. Common words such as “the”, “and” and “of” are skipped, along with phrases that start or end with one; untick the box to include them. Capital letters are ignored, so “Apple” and “apple” count as the same word.
Limits and files
Enter a limit to see how many characters or words you have left, for example for a meta description, a text message, a social media post or an application essay. You can open .txt and .md files up to 5 MB. For a Word document or a PDF, copy the text and paste it in. Long texts are counted in the background, so typing stays smooth.
Questions
Does the character count include spaces? Yes. Characters includes spaces and line breaks, because most forms and websites count them. Characters without spaces is shown next to it for limits that leave spaces out.
Does it work for other languages? Yes. Every character counts once in any script, including accented letters, Cyrillic, Arabic, Korean and Chinese. Common words are skipped in the top words list only for the language of this page.