Word Counter

A word counter is an online tool that counts the words, characters, sentences and paragraphs in a text and estimates how long it takes to read. It treats any run of characters separated by spaces or line breaks as one word, so "well-known" counts as one word and "New York" counts as two. Characters are shown twice, with and without spaces, because limits differ: social posts and many forms count spaces, while some systems count only visible characters. For example, the sentence "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog." has 9 words, 44 characters with spaces, 36 characters without spaces and 1 sentence. At 200 words per minute, a 1,000 word essay takes about 5 minutes to read. All counting happens in your browser, so the text you paste is never uploaded or stored.

Words are groups of characters separated by spaces or line breaks. Characters are counted with and without spaces, which matters for limits such as meta descriptions or social posts.

Sentences are counted by their ending punctuation, and paragraphs by blank lines. The reading time assumes about 200 words per minute, a common speed for silent reading.

Take this short text, typed as two paragraphs with one blank line between them: "Good tools save time. They also respect your privacy!" and then "Does it work for long texts? Yes, it does." The word counter reports 18 words, 97 characters, 79 characters without spaces, 4 sentences and 2 paragraphs.

Here is how those numbers arise. Splitting on spaces and line breaks gives 18 words. The characters-with-spaces figure is 97 because every space and both line breaks of the blank line are counted as characters. Removing all spaces and line breaks leaves 79, so 18 characters of whitespace were ignored: 16 spaces and 2 line breaks. The sentences end at the period, the exclamation mark, the question mark and the final period, which makes 4. The blank line separates the two paragraphs.

Reading time follows one simple rule: words divided by 200, rounded to the nearest minute. This text has 18 words, so it shows "under 1 min". A 450 word article is 2.25 minutes and shows 2 minutes. A 1,200 word essay is 6 minutes. A 2,500 word report is 12.5 minutes and rounds to 13 minutes.

Check which kind of limit you have before you write. A word limit, such as 500 words for an essay, uses the word count. A character limit, such as 280 characters for a post on X or around 160 characters for a search result description, normally counts spaces, so read the characters-with-spaces figure. Search engines cut descriptions by display width rather than by an exact number, so treat 150 to 160 characters as a guide, not a guarantee.

Know the edge cases. Sentences are detected by the punctuation . ! ? and the ellipsis character, so abbreviations such as "e.g." and decimal numbers such as "3.5" can add extra sentences to the count. Punctuation set apart by spaces, as in French typography before a question mark, counts as a word of its own. Counts can also differ slightly from another program, because every tool defines a word a little differently, so always check the rule of the platform or teacher who sets the limit.

If you need to shorten a text, work out the target first. To cut a 1,200 word essay by 15 percent, remove 180 words and aim for 1,020. The [percentage calculator](percentage-calculator) does this kind of arithmetic for you. Paste the revised text back into the counter to confirm the result.