Word counter
Paste or type your text, and everything recounts as you go.
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Words
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Characters
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Characters without spaces
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Sentences
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Paragraphs
Estimated reading time: 0 min
Most common words
Type something and the most common words appear here.
How it works
Words are counted as runs of characters separated by whitespace, the same way word processors count. A hyphenated compound therefore counts as one word. Punctuation standing on its own, such as a dash, does not count.
Characters are counted as the reader sees them, not as storage units. An emoji counts as one character even though it takes more room in memory, and so does a flag or a family built from several characters.
Sentences are counted from closing punctuation, meaning full stops, question marks and exclamation marks. An abbreviation such as e.g. can therefore add one sentence too many. The figure is an estimate, not a verdict.
Paragraphs are separated by a blank line. A single line break does not start a new paragraph.
Reading time assumes 200 words per minute, a common benchmark for running text on screen. Technical writing reads more slowly.
Nothing you type leaves your browser.
What counts as a word
A word is anything between two spaces that contains something other than punctuation. A dash with spaces round it therefore does not count as a word, but word,word;word with no spaces counts as one. The list of most common words counts differently: there the text is split at punctuation, hyphens and apostrophes are kept, and everything is lowercased. E-mail stays one word, and CAT is the same word as cat.
The Unicode standard on text segmentation points out that word boundaries are not set by spaces and punctuation alone, and that some languages do not use spaces at all. For such text the word count will be misleading.
Characters and grapheme clusters
The tool splits the text into grapheme clusters with the browser’s Intl.Segmenter function. Grapheme cluster is Unicode’s name for what a reader perceives as one character, and under the standard every emoji sequence in its recommended set is one cluster. The family emoji 👨👩👧 is made of five code points, three people and two invisible joiners, but counts as one character, as does an é typed as an e followed by a combining accent. The text “Hi 👋🏽 you” gives 8 characters, 6 without spaces. An older browser without Intl.Segmenter counts code points instead, and there the family emoji is five characters.
Example and reading time
The text “The cat sat. Dr. Smith arrived at 3.30 p.m. today… Did he? Yes!” gives 13 words, 63 characters and 6 sentences, because the full stops after Dr and p.m. are followed by a space. The correct count is four.
Reading time is the number of words divided by 200, rounded up, with a minimum of one minute: 201 words become 2 minutes and 1,000 words 5. A meta-analysis by Brysbaert of 190 studies with 18,573 participants found that adults read English non-fiction silently at 238 words a minute on average and fiction at 260, with most adults between 175 and 300 for non-fiction.