Word Counter

Count words, characters, sentences and paragraphs as you type, with reading and speaking time.

Free, no limit Nothing uploaded Works offline No sign-up
0Words
0Characters
0Characters without spaces
0Sentences
0Paragraphs
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0 minReading time
0 minSpeaking time

Counts that update as you type, on text that stays yours

Words, characters with and without spaces, sentences, paragraphs, lines, and an estimate of how long the piece takes to read or to say aloud. All of it recalculates on every keystroke, with no button and no page reload.

A word here is a run of characters separated by whitespace, which is the same definition Word and Google Docs use. That means a hyphenated compound counts as one and an em dash between two words counts as none, which is worth knowing if your target is exact.

The text never leaves your browser. That matters more than it sounds for this particular tool, because the things people count are unpublished articles, coursework, client proposals and cover letters, and pasting any of those into a hosted counter hands over a copy.

A block of text with live word, character and sentence counts

How to use it

Type or paste into the box and every count updates on the keystroke. There is no convert button because there is nothing to wait for.

Copy puts the result on your clipboard and confirms it did. Download saves it as a file, which is the easier route when the output is long enough that selecting it by hand is a nuisance. Clear empties the boxes and puts the cursor back where you need it.

Where a sample button appears, it loads a small realistic example. It is there so you can see what the tool expects before pasting your own material, which is quicker than reading a description of the input format.

Keyboard and mobile

The text areas are ordinary form fields, so every shortcut your system already has works: select all, undo, redo, and paste without formatting. Tab moves between the panes and the controls in the order you would expect, and every control is reachable without a mouse.

On a phone the panes stack rather than sitting side by side, and the text areas grow to a comfortable height. Spellcheck and autocorrect are switched off in them, because a tool that silently capitalises your word counter input is worse than useless.

If something looks wrong

When the result is not what you expected, the message under the boxes is the first thing to read. It reports what happened rather than a generic failure, so a malformed input names the line to look at and a successful run reports what it did, such as how many lines it kept or how many replacements it made.

A count of zero is informative in itself. It usually means the input did not contain what you thought it did, most often because of capitalisation or an invisible trailing space, both of which are far more common in pasted data than people expect.

Nothing is corrected silently. If the input cannot be handled, the output is left empty and the reason is stated, rather than a partial result being returned that looks plausible and is wrong. A tool that guesses is worse than one that says it could not.

Where the reading time comes from

Reading speed varies with the reader and the material, so any single number is an estimate. These are the figures behind the ones shown.

  • 238 words per minute for silent reading of non fiction, which is the mean from a 2019 meta analysis across many studies.
  • 140 words per minute for speaking aloud at a comfortable presentation pace. Audiobooks sit around 150, and a nervous speaker goes considerably faster.
  • Technical material reads slower, often by a third, because the reader stops to think.

For a talk, the speaking figure is the useful one. A ten minute slot is about 1400 words, and going over that means either rushing or overrunning, both of which an audience notices.

Lengths that people actually write to

Most writing is done against a limit of some kind, and the useful ones are not always the official ones.

WhereLimitWhat is visible
Title tagAbout 60 charactersCut by pixel width in results
Meta descriptionAbout 160 charactersOften rewritten by Google
X or Twitter post280 charactersAll of it
LinkedIn post3000 charactersAbout 200 before the more link
Instagram caption2200 charactersAbout 125 before the more link
SMS160 charactersAll of it, until an emoji halves it

The gap between the limit and what is visible is the number that matters. A LinkedIn post can run to three thousand characters and almost nobody expands it, so the first two hundred are doing all the work. The same applies to an Instagram caption and to the opening line of an email.

Search limits are stated in characters and enforced in pixels, which is why guidance varies. A title in capitals or full of wide letters is truncated earlier than a narrow one at the same character count. Writing to roughly sixty characters and putting the important words first is the reliable approach.

For long form writing, word count is a poor proxy for quality and a useful proxy for coverage. Pieces that rank for competitive informational queries tend to be long because they answer the whole question, not because length is rewarded on its own.

Your text stays on your device

Everything here runs inside the page. Nothing you type or paste is transmitted, stored or logged, and there is no account, no analytics on the content and no server that ever sees it.

That matters more for text tools than it looks. The things people run through them are unpublished articles, coursework, client proposals, cover letters, contract wording and internal documents. Every one of those pasted into a hosted tool becomes a copy on somebody else's machine, kept for a period nobody states.

Because the work happens locally it is also instant. There is no button to press and no round trip to wait for: the result updates as you type, on text of any length, and it keeps working with the connection switched off.

Nothing is saved between visits either. Close the tab and the text is gone, which is the correct behaviour for a tool you reached for once to fix one thing.

No limits, and no account

There is no cap on how much text you can run through this, no daily quota and no sign up wall at the point where it becomes useful. The Word Counter tool costs us nothing to provide because it runs on your device rather than ours, so there is nothing to meter.

There is also nothing to install. It is one page of HTML, one stylesheet and one script, which together come to a fraction of the weight of a single photograph. It loads in well under a second on a phone connection and works immediately.

Why we built it this way

A tool this simple should not require an account, an upload or an advert covering the result. The work is a few milliseconds of arithmetic on text you already have, and there is no honest reason for it to involve a server at all.

The whole site is built on the same rule: if the work can be done in the browser, it is done in the browser. Over a hundred tools work that way, and the handful that genuinely cannot are the ones we have not built.

It also means the tool keeps working when we are not paying attention to it. There is no service to go down, no API key to expire and no rate limit to hit at the moment you need it most. The page you loaded is the whole program, and it will behave the same way in five years as it does today.

FAQ

Word Counter

The questions people ask most about this tool.

As a run of characters separated by whitespace, which matches Word and Google Docs. A hyphenated compound counts as one word.

It uses 238 words per minute, the mean for silent reading of non fiction. Technical writing reads slower and light fiction faster, so treat it as a guide.

No. Everything is counted in this page and disappears when you close the tab. Nothing is transmitted and nothing is logged.

It depends on the query rather than a target. For a competitive informational search, articles that rank tend to run 1500 to 2500 words, because they cover the topic fully rather than because length itself helps.

Completely, with no account, no quota and no paid tier. It runs on your own device, so there is nothing for us to meter and nothing to charge for.

No. Everything happens inside this page, in memory on your machine. Nothing is transmitted, stored or logged, and you can confirm it by watching your browser's network panel while you type.

Yes. Once the page has loaded it never needs the network again, so you can disconnect and carry on working.

None that we impose. The practical limit is your device's memory, which on a modern machine is a very large amount of text.

Yes. The panes stack on a narrow screen and the controls stay reachable. Autocorrect is switched off in the input, so nothing is silently changed as you type.

Yes, freely and with no attribution required. What you paste is yours and so is what comes out.

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