Word & Character Counter

How to use the Word & Character Counter

1. Type or paste your text into the box. The counts update on every keystroke.
2. Read the word, character, sentence and paragraph totals in the results panel.
3. Use the reading-time estimate to size an article, email or speech.
4. Copy the text or clear the box when you are done. Nothing is stored.

Good to know

• Words are found with Unicode word segmentation (Intl.Segmenter) where your browser supports it, so Chinese, Japanese and Thai text is split into words. Browsers without it fall back to counting runs of letters and digits, which matches for ordinary Latin text.
• Punctuation and emoji alone are not words. Hyphenated terms such as “well-known” count as two words; contractions such as “don’t” and numbers such as 3.14 count as one.
• Characters are counted by Unicode code point, so one emoji is one character. Combined sequences (a letter plus a separate accent mark, or an emoji family joined with invisible characters) count each code point.
• “No spaces” removes every whitespace character, including tabs and line breaks, before counting.
• A sentence ends at . ! ? … (or 。！？) followed by a space or the end of the text, so “3.14” does not split a sentence. Abbreviations such as “Dr. Smith” are counted as ending a sentence, and line breaks alone do not end one.
• Paragraphs are blocks separated by at least one blank line.
• Reading time is the word count divided by 238 words per minute, an average adult silent-reading speed, rounded to the second. Individual speeds vary widely.
• Text beyond 2,000,000 characters is refused with a message rather than risking a frozen tab.

Examples

A short sentence

“Don’t panic: it’s 3.14 pm.” → 5 words (don’t, panic, it’s, 3.14, pm), 1 sentence, 1 paragraph.

Two paragraphs

Text with one blank line between two blocks counts as 2 paragraphs. Several blank lines in a row still count as one break.

Emoji and accents

“Café 👍” → 1 word and 6 characters (C, a, f, é, space, 👍). The emoji counts as one character, not two.

Frequently asked questions