How to count words
- Enter your text. Type or paste your text in the Your text box.
- Read the count. The Count panel shows the words, characters, sentences, paragraphs and lines. It updates while you type.
- Check your most used words. The Most used words table lists your ten most frequent words and how often each one appears.
What is a word counter?
A word counter is a tool that counts the words in a text. It helps when a text must fit a limit, such as an essay of 500 words or a post of 280 characters. The guide on character limits lists the limits of the main platforms.
This Word Counter also counts characters, sentences, paragraphs and lines, and estimates how long the text takes to read and to speak.
Features
- Live count of words, characters and characters without spaces.
- Sentences, paragraphs and lines counted at the same time.
- Reading time and speaking time for the whole text.
- Ten most used words with their count and their share of all words.
- Long texts: up to 1,000,000 characters.
How each number is counted
| Number | How it is counted |
|---|---|
| Words | Groups of characters separated by spaces or line breaks |
| Characters | Every letter, digit, space, symbol and line break. An emoji counts as one or more characters |
| Characters without spaces | Characters minus spaces, tabs and line breaks |
| Sentences | Parts of the text that end with a full stop, a question mark, an exclamation mark or a line break |
| Paragraphs | Lines that are not empty |
| Lines | All lines, empty lines included |
| Reading time | Words divided by 200 words per minute |
| Speaking time | Words divided by 130 words per minute |
The two times are estimates. Real reading and speaking speed differs from person to person. The guide on speech word count has a table for speeches of 1 to 60 minutes.
Why the count may differ from another tool
- Words joined by a hyphen. "well-known" is one word here because it has no space. Some tools count it as two. See where the word count in Docs and in Word comes from.
- Abbreviations. "e.g. this" contains two full stops, so the sentence count can be higher than the real number of sentences.
- Chinese, Japanese and Thai. These languages do not put spaces between words, so the word count is too low for them. The character count is still correct.
- Emojis. Some emojis are made of several characters, so one emoji can add more than one to the character count.
Related tools
Three other tools on this site help with the same text. Fix capital letters with the case converter before you count. Clean double spaces with the tool to remove extra spaces, because every space counts as a character. Write and keep a draft in the online notepad, which saves it in your browser.
Is it private?
Yes. The text is counted inside your browser. It is not sent to our server and is not saved by us.
Frequently asked questions
- How do I count the words in my text?
- Paste or type the text in the box. The number of words appears in the Count panel at once.
- Does the character count include spaces?
- Yes. Characters includes spaces. Characters without spaces is shown as a separate number.
- How is reading time calculated?
- The number of words is divided by 200 words per minute. Speaking time uses 130 words per minute.
- How long a text can I count?
- The box takes up to 1,000,000 characters.
- Is the Word Counter free?
- Yes. It is free and you do not need an account.