Word Counter

This free word counter shows how long your text is while you write. Type or paste into the box and words, characters, sentences, paragraphs, lines, average word length, reading time and speaking time update with every keystroke. It also works as a character counter for posts and text messages, a keyword density checker and a case converter.

What the word counter measures

• Words: anything between spaces that contains a letter or a digit. Hyphenated words such as well-known, contractions such as don’t, numbers such as 3.14 or 1,000 and web addresses each count as one word.
• Characters: each visible symbol counts once. An emoji, a flag, a skin-tone emoji or an accented letter is 1 character, even though some of them are stored as several code units. Spaces and line breaks are included. No spaces leaves out spaces, tabs and line breaks.
• Sentences: text that ends with a period, question mark, exclamation mark or line break. Abbreviations such as Dr. and e.g., and numbers such as 2.0, do not end a sentence.
• Paragraphs and lines: paragraphs are non-empty lines, the way word processors count them. Lines include blank lines.
• Average word length: letters and digits per word.

Languages written without spaces between words, such as Chinese, Japanese and Thai, are split into words using the word dictionary built into your browser, so a sentence like 我喜欢学习中文 counts as 4 words rather than 1 or 7.

Reading time and speaking time

Reading time assumes 238 words per minute, the average silent reading rate for English non-fiction reported in a 2019 review of reading-speed studies by Marc Brysbaert in the Journal of Memory and Language. Speaking time assumes 130 words per minute, a typical estimate for a talk or presentation. Both are averages, not a measure of any one person; you can set your own speeds in the Info tab.

Keyword density

The Density tab lists the words you use most, with how many times each appears and its share of the total word count. Common stop words such as the, and, of and is are left out so the list shows the words that carry meaning; tick Include stop words to see everything. Switch to 2 words or 3 words to find repeated phrases. Phrases only count when they appear at least twice and never run across a comma or the end of a sentence. It helps you spot words you repeat too often.

Limits for posts, texts, titles and descriptions

The Limits tab shows how much room is left, or how far over you are, against common length guidance:

• X post: 280, counted the way X roughly does it, where a link counts as 23 and an emoji or most Chinese, Japanese and Korean characters count as 2.
• SMS: a text that only uses the standard GSM-7 character set fits 160 characters in one message and 153 per part once it is split. One character outside that set, such as an emoji or a curly apostrophe, switches the whole message to UCS-2, which fits 70 characters, or 67 per part. The tool shows the encoding, the number of parts and which characters forced UCS-2.
• Meta description (about 155 to 160 characters) and page title (about 60). Search engines cut these by pixel width, so treat the numbers as typical guidance.

Case converter and clean-up

The Convert tab rewrites your text as UPPERCASE, lowercase, Title Case or Sentence case. Title Case keeps short words such as of, the and and in lowercase unless they start or end the title, and keeps acronyms such as NASA and brand spellings such as iPhone. Sentence case capitalizes the first word of each sentence and the word I. The clean-up buttons remove extra spaces, blank lines or all line breaks. Undo takes back any change.

Your text stays private

Everything is counted inside the page. Your text is never sent anywhere. It is autosaved in this browser so a reload does not lose your draft, and Clear deletes the saved copy.

FAQ

Is this word counter free?

Yes. There is no account and no limit on length, and long documents of 50,000 characters or more still count in a fraction of a second.

Why does my count differ slightly from my word processor?

Tools disagree on edge cases such as dashes and symbols. This counter treats anything with a letter or digit between spaces as a word, splits on em dashes, and ignores symbols that stand alone.

Want to write faster too? Test your speed in our Typing Test, or play with letters in Word Scramble.