Word Counter
Live word, character, and reading-time stats.
Runs entirely in your browser. Nothing you type is sent to a server.
Type or paste text and this word counter instantly reports word count, character count (with and without spaces), sentence count, paragraph count, and estimated reading and speaking time. It uses Unicode-aware regular expressions so it works with English, Chinese, Arabic, Hindi, and mixed-script documents. Reading time assumes 238 words per minute — the meta-analysis average for adult silent reading published by Marc Brysbaert in 2019 — and speaking time assumes 130 wpm for conversational pace. Everything is computed live in your browser as you type; nothing is uploaded.
About the Word Counter
Count words, characters, sentences, paragraphs, and estimated reading time in real time. Whether you're writing an essay, tweet, or blog post, our word counter gives you instant, accurate stats without leaving the page.
How to use the Word Counter
- 1Paste or type your text into the editor.
- 2Watch the stat cards update live as you write.
- 3Edit your text until you hit your target word or character count.
- 4Copy the finished text back into your document — nothing is uploaded.
Why use our Word Counter
Real-time stats
Words, characters, sentences, paragraphs, and reading time update as you type.
No character limit
Paste in long essays, articles, or chapters — performance stays snappy.
Reading-time estimate
Based on an average reading speed of 220 words per minute.
Completely private
Your writing stays on your device — no server, no tracking of input.
How each metric is computed
Words are counted by splitting the input on runs of whitespace and filtering empty tokens. Characters-with-spaces is the raw string length. Characters-without-spaces is the length after removing every whitespace character. Sentences are counted by matching sequences ending in . ? or ! followed by whitespace or end-of-string. Paragraphs are counted by splitting on two or more consecutive newlines. Reading time is computed as Math.ceil(words / 238) minutes, and speaking time as Math.ceil(words / 130) minutes. The Chinese, Japanese, and Korean scripts don't separate words with spaces, so those runs are counted per character — a 500-character Chinese essay reports roughly the same reading time as a 500-word English essay, which lines up with empirical CJK reading-speed studies.
Typical length targets writers hit
Knowing the target length before you start writing saves hours. Twitter/X posts run 40 to 70 words in practice, even though the 280-character limit allows more. Instagram cuts captions at 125 characters in the feed before adding a "more" link, so the first two sentences carry the message. Meta descriptions cap at 155-160 characters (~25 words) before Google truncates. Blog posts that rank well on Google in most niches sit between 1,500 and 2,500 words. College Common App essays cap at 650 words. TED talks average 155 words per minute delivered, so an 18-minute talk is roughly 2,300 spoken words. The reference table below groups the most common targets.
Common mistakes and limitations
"Word" isn't a universal unit. Hyphenated compounds (state-of-the-art) count as one word here and in Microsoft Word, but as four in some transcription-billing systems. Contractions (don't, we're) count as one everywhere. Numbers count as words in this tool because they're separated by whitespace, but some counters exclude them. Sentence detection is naïve — abbreviations like "e.g." or "Mr." produce false sentence breaks. CJK text has no clean "word" boundary; the character-based fallback used here is a pragmatic approximation, not a real morphological word count. Reading speed varies enormously between individuals: the Brysbaert 2019 range for adult silent reading is roughly 175 to 300 wpm depending on skill and material — the 238 figure is a mean, not a personal target. Finally, the tool can't count words inside PDF, DOCX, or image files; you have to paste plain text.
Typical length targets by content type
| Content type | Target words | Reading / speaking time |
|---|---|---|
| Tweet or X post | 40-70 | ~20 seconds |
| SMS | 20-30 | ~10 seconds |
| Instagram caption (visible in feed) | 18-22 (first 125 chars) | ~10 seconds |
| LinkedIn post (optimal) | 150-300 | 1-2 minutes |
| Meta description | ~25 (max 160 chars) | — |
| SEO title tag | ~10 (max 60 chars) | — |
| Blog post targeting Google | 1,500-2,500 | 6-10 minutes reading |
| Common App college essay | 250-650 (hard cap) | 1-3 minutes reading |
| Elevator pitch | ~65 | ~30 seconds spoken |
| Standard TED talk (18 min) | ~2,300 | 18 minutes spoken |
| Novel (typical) | 70,000-100,000 | 5-7 hours reading |
Frequently asked questions
How is a "word" counted?+
Any run of non-whitespace characters separated by whitespace counts as one word. So "state-of-the-art" is one word, "don't" is one word, and "1,234" is one word. This matches the definition used by Microsoft Word, Google Docs, and most publishers.
Does the tool count numbers as words?+
Yes. A number surrounded by whitespace counts as one word, the same way Microsoft Word counts it. If your publisher excludes numbers, subtract them manually — search-and-count for \d+ in the text.
Why is the count different from Microsoft Word's?+
The two tools usually match. Small differences appear when a document contains footnotes, headers, or comments — Microsoft Word can be configured to include or exclude those in the total, and the setting isn't obvious.
How does it handle Chinese, Japanese, and Korean?+
CJK scripts don't use spaces between words, so a whitespace-based count would return 1 for an entire paragraph. This tool counts CJK characters as characters (each ideograph = one unit), which lines up with reading-speed research for those languages.
Where does the 238 wpm reading speed come from?+
From Marc Brysbaert's 2019 meta-analysis, "How many words do we read per minute?" (Journal of Memory and Language), which synthesised results from 190 studies and reported a mean silent reading rate of 238 wpm for non-fiction and 260 wpm for fiction.
Is my text saved or uploaded?+
No. Everything is counted in your browser tab in real time. Nothing is sent to a server, cached, or logged.
Can I count words in a PDF, Word document, or image?+
Not directly — the tool only counts pasted plain text. Copy the text out of your document first, then paste it here. For images, use an OCR tool to extract the text and paste that.
Does it count hyphenated words as one or two?+
One. "State-of-the-art" is a single token because it contains no whitespace. If a publisher's contract counts each hyphenated fragment separately, you'll need to adjust.
Does it count words inside code blocks?+
Yes — the tool doesn't detect Markdown or HTML syntax. If you want a prose-only word count, strip code fences and HTML tags before pasting.
What's the difference between characters with and without spaces?+
Characters-with-spaces is the raw length of the text, including every space, tab, and newline. Characters-without-spaces removes those and is the figure most social platforms use (Twitter/X counts URLs and spaces; SMS counts every character).
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