Word Counter

What is this word counter?

This is a live counter for English prose. As you type or paste, it measures the size and shape of your text: how many words and characters it holds, how it breaks into sentences and paragraphs, how long it takes to read, and how varied the vocabulary is.

Unlike the counter buried in a word processor's status bar, everything is visible at once and nothing is hidden behind a menu. There is also no document to save, no format to worry about, and no limit on how many times you check.

How to use it

1. Click into the text box and type, or paste from anywhere with Ctrl + V (Cmd + V on a Mac).
2. Watch the statistics panel update as you go. There is no button to press.
3. Adjust the reading and speaking speeds if the defaults do not match your audience.
4. Use Copy summary to put a plain-text report of every figure on your clipboard, or Download summary to save it as a .txt file.
5. Load example fills the box with a sample paragraph if you just want to see what the tool reports.

If you are working on something long and want the text to survive a reload, switch on Remember this text on this device under the input box. That stores your draft in your own browser and nowhere else.

How the counting works

Every figure comes from an explicit rule, and the rules are the same across the whole site.

• Words — the text is split on whitespace, and a piece counts as a word if it contains at least one letter or digit. So don't, state-of-the-art and 2026 are each one word, while a lone dash is not a word at all.
• Characters — every character including spaces, punctuation and line breaks. Turn on Count emoji as one character to measure visible symbols instead of the underlying code units.
• Characters without spaces — the same count with all whitespace removed, including tabs and non-breaking spaces.
• Sentences — a sentence closes at ., !, ? or … when the following text starts something new. Abbreviations such as Dr. and Inc. and decimals such as 3.5 do not end a sentence.
• Paragraphs — blocks separated by a blank line. Single line breaks stay inside the same paragraph.
• Reading and speaking time — word count divided by the selected words-per-minute rate.
• Unique words — distinct words after lowercasing (when that option is on) and trimming punctuation from the edges.
• Vocabulary density — unique words divided by total words, as a percentage. Higher means more varied wording; lower means more repetition.

The methodology page spells out the edge cases, including how Windows line endings and emoji are handled.

Worked examples

Take this three-sentence text:

Dr. Alvarez reviewed the draft on Jan. 5.
It ran to 3.5 pages. Was that too long?

The counter reports 14 words, 3 sentences, 1 paragraph and 2 lines. A naive counter that splits on every period would report five sentences, breaking after Dr., Jan. and 3.

Now a vocabulary example. The sentence "The cat sat on the mat and the mat moved." holds 10 words but only 7 unique ones, because the appears three times and mat twice. Vocabulary density is 70 percent. Push that number below about 40 percent in a long piece and you are probably repeating yourself.

For length planning: a 1,200-word article at the default 238 words per minute reads in about 5 minutes 3 seconds. Read the same text aloud at 150 words per minute and it runs 8 minutes — a difference worth knowing before you record a voiceover.

Common use cases

• Hitting an assignment limit. Essays with a 1,500-word cap are easier to trim when you can see the count move sentence by sentence.
• Fitting an article brief. Editors commission by word count; the reading time figure tells you whether that count matches the "5 minute read" label on the page.
• Tightening marketing copy. Average sentence length above roughly 25 words is a signal to break something up.
• Checking a translation. Comparing word counts between source and target catches whole paragraphs that were skipped.
• Reviewing your own habits. The longest word and average word length hint at whether a piece leans on jargon.
• Preparing a talk. Speaking time turns a script into a slot length before you rehearse.

Privacy and security

The counting code runs in your browser. Your draft is held in the page's memory while the tab is open and is discarded when you close it. Nothing is uploaded, logged or shared, so confidential drafts, client work and unpublished manuscripts are safe to paste here.

The one exception is under your control: if you enable Remember this text on this device, the text is written to your browser's local storage so it survives a reload. Turning the switch back off deletes it immediately. Avoid using that option on a shared computer.

The reading speed and option settings you choose are also stored locally so the tool opens the way you left it. See the privacy policy for the full picture.