Word and Character Counter
Paste or type your text and this word counter and text counter shows words, characters, sentences, paragraphs and lines while you write, plus reading and speaking time. Everything is counted inside this browser tab, and your text is neither uploaded nor saved.
Quick answer: Type or paste your text and the Words figure gives the total as you write, beside characters with and without spaces, sentences, paragraphs and lines. In text written with spaces, a word is any run between spaces that holds a letter or digit, so another counter may report a different total.
Counted in this browser tab. Nothing is uploaded or saved.
Limits: Up to 5 MB of text. Larger input is refused with a message.
Results
- Words
- 0
- Characters
- 0
- Characters without spaces
- 0
- Sentences
- 0
- Paragraphs
- 0
- Lines
- 0
- Average word length
- 0 letters
- Reading time
- 0
- Speaking time
- 0
How to use the Word and Character Counter
- Type in the box, or paste a draft from your editor, an email or a document.
- Read the counts in the results panel; they refresh a moment after you stop typing.
- Adjust the reading and speaking speeds in the settings if your audience needs it.
- Press Copy results to paste the figures into a brief or a report, or Clear to start over.
Worked example
This short draft has two paragraphs separated by a blank line, an apostrophe and a hyphenated word. Press Load the example above the results to put it in the box; the counts below are what the tool shows for it.
Write for the reader first. Google says it has no preferred word count, so a page can be as long as its topic needs. Don't pad a well-known subject to reach a number. Count the words when a brief, a form or a platform sets a limit. Then cut what repeats until the draft fits, and check the total again.
- Words
- 60
- Characters
- 303
- Characters without spaces
- 243
- Sentences
- 5
- Paragraphs
- 2
- Lines
- 3
- Average word length
- 3.9
- Reading time
- 18 sec
- Speaking time
- 28 sec
How to read the results
- Words
- Runs of text between spaces that contain a letter or a digit. Don't and well-known are one word each, and so is a web address. A no-break space splits words like an ordinary space, and a keycap emoji, a digit drawn in a box, is not a word.
- Characters
- Everything you typed, counted the way it looks: spaces, tabs and each line break included, and an emoji or a flag counted once.
- Characters without spaces
- The same count with every space, tab and line break left out, for a brief that asks for characters excluding spaces.
- Sentences
- Pieces that end with a period, question mark, exclamation mark or ellipsis, or with the full stop or question mark of Urdu, Arabic, Hindi, Chinese or Japanese, and every line that ends without one, such as a heading.
- Paragraphs
- Lines that contain any text. The blank lines you leave between paragraphs are not counted.
- Lines
- Every line in the box, blank ones included. A line break at the very end does not add a line.
- Average word length
- Letters and digits per word, to one decimal place, each counted the way the character count sees it, so an accent or a vowel sign stays with its letter. Punctuation inside or around a word is left out.
- Reading time and speaking time
- The word count divided by the speeds in the settings, rounded to the nearest second. Any text with a word in it shows at least 1 second.
How this tool works and its limitations
The text is first given the same line endings everywhere, so a document saved on Windows counts exactly like one saved on a Mac. Characters are then counted as grapheme clusters with the browser's Intl.Segmenter, the standard way to find the characters a reader sees, as MDN describes. In an older browser without it, a built in rule joins accents, skin tone modifiers, joined emoji and flag pairs instead.
Words are found by splitting on spaces. Chinese and Japanese letters count one word each, while Thai, Lao, Khmer and Myanmar runs go through the browser's word dictionary. A long paste is counted in batches of lines with a short break after each batch, so typing and scrolling keep working while the totals are added up. Nothing is stored and no request is made with your text. These are the limits to keep in mind:
- Word, sentence and paragraph rules are fixed conventions, so another counter can give different numbers for the same text.
- Sentence ends after abbreviations other than a short English list (Mr, Mrs, Ms, Dr, Prof, Sr, Jr, St, vs, e.g., i.e.) and after a capital initial can be miscounted.
- Thai, Lao, Khmer and Myanmar word counts depend on the dictionary in your browser and can differ between browsers.
- In Hindi and other Indic scripts, a consonant cluster joined by a virama counts as one character in a browser with recent Unicode data but as two or more in an older one or without Intl.Segmenter, so the character count and average word length for those scripts can differ between browsers. Without Intl.Segmenter, Hangul typed as separate letters can also count as more than one character.
- Counting each Chinese or Japanese letter as one word is a convention: many words in those languages are two or more letters long, so for them the word count is closer to a letter count and the reading time is only a rough guide.
- Hard wrapped text, such as an email with a line break every 70 characters, counts each line as a paragraph.
- Text larger than 5 MB is not counted; a single line of several megabytes is counted in one step and can pause the page briefly.
- Reading and speaking times are estimates from the speeds in the settings, not measurements of a real reader.
Features
- Emoji, flags and accented letters count as a single character, just as they look on screen.
- Reading time at 200 and speaking time at 130 words per minute, and you can change both.
- Pastes of up to 5 MB are counted in small steps, so the page keeps responding while it works.
- No upload, no account and no storage: close the tab and the text is gone.
Why two word counters can disagree
There is no single rule for what a word is, so two counters can report different totals for the same draft and both follow their own rules correctly. Some split a hyphenated term such as well-known into two words, some count a dash or an emoji standing alone, and some skip numbers. This counter treats any run of text between spaces as one word when it holds at least one letter or digit, which comes close to counting by eye. When someone else sets the limit, check the final draft with the tool they use.
Characters, code units and what a limit measures
A character limit sounds exact, but systems count in different units. This tool counts characters the way you see them, so a family emoji built from several people joined together is one character. JavaScript and the HTML maxlength attribute count UTF-16 code units instead, as MDN's maxlength reference explains, and that same emoji uses 11 of them. If a form rejects text that fits by this count, emoji and accents are the usual reason. Search results are another case again: a title or a description there is cut by its width in pixels, which the SEO Title Length Checker and the Meta Description Length Checker estimate.
Reading and speaking times are estimates
The default reading speed of 200 words per minute is a round, cautious figure. A 2019 review of 190 studies by Marc Brysbaert put the average silent reading rate for adults at 238 words per minute for English nonfiction and 183 for reading aloud. The speaking default of 130 is slower on purpose, because it allows for the pauses of a talk or a video rather than a steady read aloud.
Frequently asked questions
Does the counter save or upload my text?
No. Your text stays in the page you have open. It is not sent to Imagenati or anyone else and it is not written to browser storage. Spell checking is also switched off in the box, because some browsers can send the contents of a field to an online spelling service.
Is there an ideal word count for SEO?
No. Google's guidance on helpful, people first content says that Google does not have a preferred word count, so length is not a goal on its own. Write until the reader's question is answered, then use the count to meet any limit you were given.
How are emoji and accented letters counted?
Each one counts as one character, the way it appears on screen. A family emoji made of four people and three invisible joiners, a country flag and a letter typed with a separate accent mark are each a single character here.
How does it count Chinese, Japanese or Thai text?
Chinese and Japanese are written without spaces, so each Han, Hiragana or Katakana letter counts as one word. Thai, Lao, Khmer and Myanmar are split with your browser's own word dictionary where it has one. Korean puts spaces between words, so it counts like English.
Why does the paragraph count look high for an email I pasted?
Here a paragraph is any line with text on it. Plain text emails and some exported files break lines every 70 or so characters, so each of those lines becomes a paragraph. Join the lines first, or go by the word count.
How many words is this text?
Paste or type it into the box above and the Words figure in the results gives the total. This text counter updates as you type.
How many characters is my text?
Paste or type it into the box and the Characters figure gives the total, counting spaces, tabs and line breaks, while Characters without spaces leaves them out.
Last updated .