Free tool
Word counter
Words, characters, sentences and paragraphs as you type — plus reading level, reading time and speaking time.
- Nothing uploaded
- No signup
- No length limit
Your text
Nothing is uploaded, stored or logged — every count runs in your browser.
Readout
Idle0
Words
0
Characters
0
Sentences
0
Paragraphs
Reading level
needs 25 words
—
Reading time
at 238 wpm
0 sec
Speaking time
at 130 wpm
0 sec
What each statistic actually measures
Counting tools disagree with each other more than you would expect, and almost none of them say how they count. A hyphenated compound, an emoji, a bulleted list and an abbreviation are all decisions, not facts. Here are the rules this tool uses, so you can tell whether a number will match the one your editor, marker or CMS reports.
Words
Runs of letters, digits, apostrophes and hyphens
“State-of-the-art” is one word, “don’t” is one, and standalone numbers count. Matches Microsoft Word and Google Docs.
Characters
Every character, counted by code point
Includes spaces, line breaks and punctuation. Emoji and CJK characters count as one each, not two.
Characters without spaces
All whitespace removed
Strips tabs and line breaks as well as spaces. This is the figure most character limits on printed forms mean.
Sentences
Split on . ! ? with abbreviations protected
“Dr.”, “e.g.” and single initials do not split. A fragment with no terminator still counts as one sentence.
Paragraphs
Split on blank lines
A single line break does not start a paragraph. One unbroken block is one paragraph, however long.
Reading level
Median grade across several formulas
Needs about 25 words. The median is steadier than any single formula, which can swing on names and technical terms.
The one case worth watching is a bulleted list. Bullets without terminating punctuation read as a single enormous sentence to every tool of this kind, which distorts the sentence count and the reading level along with it. The word and character counts stay exact.
Word and character limits that matter
Most people counting characters are writing against a specific ceiling. These are the ones with a visible consequence for going over — the post that will not send, the description Google cuts off mid-sentence. The tool above checks your text against them live.
| Where | Limit | Why it matters |
|---|---|---|
| Google title tag | 60 characters | Longer titles get truncated in search results. |
| SMS, one segment | 160 characters | Longer messages split into segments and may bill separately. |
| Meta description | 160 characters | Approximate — Google truncates on pixel width, not characters. |
| X / Twitter post | 280 characters | The standard limit without a paid subscription. |
| UCAS personal statement | 4,000 characters | A hard cap, and roughly 500–650 words in practice. |
| Instagram caption | 2,200 characters | Collapsed after about 125 characters in the feed. |
| LinkedIn post | 3,000 characters | Collapsed behind “see more” after about 210 characters. |
| Common essay brief | ±10% of target | Most institutions allow ten per cent either side unless stated. |
Reading time and speaking time
Both are word counts divided by a pace, so the only thing that matters is which pace. Every tool picks one; almost none of them say which, or where it came from.
Reading time uses 238 words per minute. That comes from Brysbaert’s 2019 meta-analysis of 190 studies covering 17,887 participants, which found silent reading of English non-fiction averages about 238wpm. The round 200 and 250 figures other tools use are not wrong so much as unsourced. Your own pace shifts with how familiar the subject is and how dense the prose is — the same reader can vary by 100 wpm between a novel and a contract.
Speaking time uses 130 words per minute, which runs roughly 1.8 times longer than reading. Delivery costs time that silent reading does not: breath, emphasis, and the pauses an audience needs to follow you. Conversation runs nearer 150 wpm, but presenting to a room is slower, and 130 is the conventional planning figure. It errs deliberately on the slow side, because a talk that finishes early is a far smaller problem than one that overruns.
For speech work, use the estimate as a starting point and then read it aloud with a timer. Nobody’s delivery matches an average, and the difference over twenty minutes is measured in minutes, not seconds. Speech length by duration
Word count tells you nothing about how the text reads
A total is the least informative thing you can know about a piece of writing. Two thousand words can be a tight argument or the same point restated eight times, and the counter cannot tell the difference. If you are writing to a brief, the numbers worth watching are on the other rows: reading level tells you whether your audience can follow it, and sentence count against word count tells you how long your average sentence has become.
This matters more than it used to, because padding to hit a target produces exactly the profile automated detectors react to. Filler sentences are predictable sentences — even in length, conventional in phrasing, low in information. Text written to reach a number tends to look machine-generated on precisely the measures detectors use, whoever wrote it.
The property that separates real writing from padding is variation: a twenty-eight-word sentence next to a four-word one. That is called burstiness, and it is worth understanding if your work is going to be checked. How burstiness works — and if you have already been flagged, the research on detector accuracy is the more useful thing to bring to that conversation.
To see sentence-length variance, passive voice and the full seven-formula grade breakdown for the same text, use the readability checker. It runs in your browser too.
Frequently asked questions
- How does this tool count words?
- A word is any run of letters, digits, apostrophes or hyphens bounded by whitespace or punctuation. That means hyphenated compounds like 'state-of-the-art' count as one word, contractions like 'don't' count as one, and standalone numbers count. This matches how Microsoft Word and Google Docs count, so a figure from this tool should agree with the count your teacher or editor sees.
- Does the character count include spaces?
- The headline character count includes spaces, line breaks and punctuation — everything you typed. A separate 'characters without spaces' figure appears in the row beneath it. Both count by character rather than by byte, so an emoji or a Chinese character counts as one, not two. Tools that use a naive length check report those as two, which is the most common counting bug in this category.
- How is reading time calculated?
- Words divided by 238 words per minute. That figure comes from Brysbaert's 2019 meta-analysis of 190 reading studies covering 17,887 participants, which put silent reading of English non-fiction at around 238 wpm. Most tools use a rounder 200 or 250 without citing anything. Your own pace will vary with subject familiarity and text difficulty, so treat it as an estimate rather than a stopwatch.
- Why is speaking time so much longer than reading time?
- Speaking time uses 130 wpm against reading's 238, so it runs roughly 1.8 times longer. Reading silently skips the physical work of speech — you do not pause for breath, land emphasis, or leave room for an audience to follow. 130 wpm is the conventional basis for presentation timing and is deliberately conservative: a talk that finishes early is a much smaller problem than one that overruns.
- How are sentences and paragraphs detected?
- Sentences split on full stops, question marks and exclamation marks, with common abbreviations protected so 'Dr. Smith' and 'e.g.' do not split incorrectly. Text with no terminator at all still counts as one sentence. Paragraphs split on blank lines — a single line break does not start a new paragraph, matching how word processors and Markdown both behave. An unbroken block of text is one paragraph however long it runs.
- What does the reading level mean?
- It is the median US school grade across several readability formulas — the level of schooling a reader would typically need to follow the text comfortably. Grade 8 is where most web writing aims. It needs about 25 words before it appears, because below that a single long sentence swings the result by several grades, and a number that unstable is worse than none.
- Is my text uploaded anywhere?
- No. Every count runs in your browser in local JavaScript. Nothing is transmitted to a server, stored or logged — which is also why there is no signup, no word limit and no usage cap. Your text is saved in your own browser's local storage so a refresh does not lose it, and clearing the box removes it.
- Does hitting a word count make writing good?
- No, and word count is the easiest thing to game in any brief. Padding to reach a target adds filler that a reader notices and a marker penalises. If you are writing to a limit, the more useful numbers on this page are the reading level and the sentence count — they tell you whether the words you have are doing work, which a total never does.