Word Counter

How it works

1. Paste or type your text into the box. An essay, a tweet, a meta description, a cover letter.
2. Press Count. You get words, characters with spaces, characters without spaces, sentences, paragraphs and an estimated reading time.
3. Trim or expand until you hit the target. Character limits for ads, titles and social posts usually count spaces, so use the with-spaces figure for those.
4. Copy the final text. Nothing was stored, so there is nothing to clean up.

Frequently asked questions

How are words counted?

For languages that use spaces, a word is a run of letters, digits or apostrophes separated by whitespace or punctuation, so don't counts as one word and 2026 counts as a word. Hyphenated words like well-known count as one. For Japanese, Chinese and Thai, which do not use spaces, each character is counted as a word, which is how those languages usually measure length.

Do characters include spaces and line breaks?

Two figures are shown: characters including spaces and line breaks, and characters excluding all whitespace. Emoji and other characters outside the Basic Multilingual Plane count as one character each, not two as JavaScript's string length would report.

How is reading time estimated?

It assumes about 200 words per minute for space-delimited languages, a common adult silent-reading average, and about 500 characters per minute for Japanese and Chinese. Real speed varies with the reader and the difficulty of the text.

What counts as a sentence or a paragraph?

Sentences end at a period, question mark, exclamation mark or the full-width equivalents used in Japanese and Chinese (。！？). Paragraphs are blocks of text separated by one or more blank lines.

Is my text uploaded?

No. Counting runs in the browser as you type, and nothing is transmitted. Draft contracts, manuscripts and private notes stay on your device.