Word counter
Count words, characters, sentences and paragraphs as you type, with reading time, speaking time and the most-used words in your text.
Words
0
Characters
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Sentences
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Paragraphs
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- Characters (no spaces)
- 0
- Lines
- 0
- Reading time
- 0 sec
- Speaking time
- 0 sec
- Average word length
- 0.0
- Longest word
- -
Ready · runs on your device
Nothing is uploaded. This tool runs entirely inside your browser tab. Your files and figures stay on your device - we never receive them, so we cannot read, store or lose them.
What gets counted
Words are runs of non-whitespace characters with leading and trailing punctuation removed. Internal hyphens and apostrophes stay, so contractions and compounds count once.
Characters are counted as graphemes where your browser supports it, not as UTF-16 code units. This matters more than it sounds: an emoji like 👨👩👧 is a single character to a reader but reports as 8 from a naive length check, and an accented é can be one or two units depending on how it was typed. Counting graphemes gives the number a person would arrive at counting by hand.
Sentences are detected by terminal punctuation - full stops, question marks, exclamation marks and ellipses. Abbreviations such as “Dr.” and “e.g.” will inflate the count slightly; no purely mechanical rule avoids this.
Paragraphs are blocks separated by a blank line.
Reading and speaking time
| Purpose | Rate | 1,000 words |
|---|---|---|
| Silent reading (prose) | 238 wpm | 4 min 12 sec |
| Silent reading (technical) | 150–200 wpm | 5–6.7 min |
| Speaking (presentation) | 150 wpm | 6 min 40 sec |
| Speaking (audiobook) | 155 wpm | 6 min 27 sec |
If you are timing a talk, rehearse rather than trusting the estimate. Pauses, slides and questions typically add 20–30% to the raw figure.
Common length targets
| Format | Typical length |
|---|---|
| Meta description | 20–25 words |
| Tweet / X post | up to ~55 words |
| Blog post | 1,000–2,500 words |
| University essay | 1,500–5,000 words |
| Conference talk (20 min) | ~2,600 words |
| Novel | 70,000–100,000 words |
The most-used words panel
The frequency list strips common English stop words - “the”, “and”, “of” and roughly 120 others - so the terms shown are the ones carrying meaning. You can switch them back on if you are checking for filler.
Writers use this two ways. For editing, an unexpectedly frequent word usually marks a tic worth varying. For SEO, it shows how prominent your target term actually is; between 0.5% and 2.5% density is the usual comfortable range, and anything above about 3% starts to read as strained to a human before it ever registers as a problem to a search engine.
Working offline
This page works with no connection once it has loaded. Nothing is uploaded, nothing is stored, and no account is needed - which makes it usable for drafts, client material and anything else you would not paste into a service that keeps a copy.
Common questions
Does this match the word count in Microsoft Word?
In almost all cases, yes. Both split on whitespace and count hyphenated compounds like "well-known" as one word. Small differences appear around footnotes, text boxes and headers, which Word can be configured to include or exclude - this tool counts exactly what you paste in.
How is reading time calculated?
Words divided by 238 per minute, the mean silent reading rate for English prose from Brysbaert's 2019 meta-analysis of 190 studies covering more than 18,000 participants. Speaking time uses 150 words per minute, a common presentation pace. Technical material reads slower and familiar material faster, so treat both as estimates.
What counts as a word?
Any run of characters separated by whitespace, with surrounding punctuation stripped. Internal apostrophes and hyphens are kept, so "don't" and "state-of-the-art" count as one word each. Numbers count as words, which matches Word and Google Docs.
Is my text stored or sent anywhere?
No. Counting happens in this page as you type. There is no request to a server, no autosave and no draft retained - closing the tab discards everything.
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