Word Counter
Live word, character, sentence and paragraph counts for essays, posts, ads and anything with a length limit.
- words
- 0
- characters
- 0
- without spaces
- 0
- sentences
- 0
- paragraphs
- 0
- lines
- 0
- bytes
- 0
- reading time
- 1
Output
Paste or type above to see the result here.
Your files stay on your device
This tool runs entirely in your browser. What you paste is processed on your device and is never sent to a server, so it is safe to use with tokens, keys and unpublished text.
Example
Example: counting the opening of a 650-word college essay
A college application essay has a 650-word limit. Its first two paragraphs are pasted in: “I didn’t plan to study engineering. In 2023 my grandfather’s well-worn radio stopped working, and I spent a summer taking it apart—and putting it back together.” and two more sentences after a blank line.
- “didn’t”, “grandfather’s” and “haven’t” are one word each; so is “well-worn”, and “2023” counts as a word.
- “apart—and” is two words: the em dash is not part of a word.
- Characters: 271 with spaces, including the two line breaks of the blank line between the paragraphs; 223 without any spaces or line breaks.
- Reading time is the words divided by 200 a minute, rounded up: under a minute shows as 1; the full 650 words would show 4.
| Count | Result |
|---|---|
| Words | 49 |
| Characters | 271 |
| Without spaces | 223 |
| Sentences | 4 |
| Paragraphs | 2 |
| Lines | 3 |
| Bytes | 273 (the em dash takes 3) |
| Reading time | 1 min |
49 of the 650 words used. A word processor that counts everything between spaces would make “apart—and” one word, so counts can differ by a word or two; for a hard limit, the count that matters is the one the application form makes.
How it works
- Paste or type your text into the box. An essay, a tweet, a meta description, a cover letter.
- The result appears as you type. You get words, characters with spaces, characters without spaces, sentences, paragraphs and an estimated reading time.
- 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.
- 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, so don’t counts as one word and 2026 counts as a word. Hyphenated words like well-known count as one; words joined by a dash, like apart—and, count as two. For Japanese and Chinese, 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 divides the words by 200 a minute, a common adult silent-reading average, and rounds up, so anything up to 200 words shows 1 minute. Text that is mostly Japanese or Chinese is timed by characters instead. 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.
- Why does my word processor give a different count?
- Programs draw the line between words differently. One that counts whatever sits between spaces makes apart—and a single word, where this counter makes it two, and some count a lone dash or symbol as a word. The difference is usually a word or two in a page.
- Which number do I use for a character limit?
- Characters with spaces: limits on posts, titles, ads and form fields count spaces, and a line break counts as a character too (two for a Windows line break). Use the figure without spaces only when the rules say so.
- 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.
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