Count words and characters live, with reading time, sentence totals and a goal tracker.
Set a target word count to track your progress.
Need bigrams, trigrams and CSV export? Try the Word Frequency Counter.
A word counter tells you how many words and characters are in a piece of text, and this one keeps a running tally the moment you start typing. There's no button to press and nothing to upload — paste an essay, a blog draft, or a tweet thread and the totals tick over in real time. Alongside the headline word count you get characters, characters without spaces, sentences, paragraphs, lines, and an estimate of how long the text takes to read aloud or in your head.
We built it for the moments when a number actually matters: a 500-word assignment, a 1,600-word article that the brief says shouldn't run long, a bio that has to fit. The goal tracker turns that target into a progress bar so you can see how close you are, and the keyword panel shows which words and phrases you're leaning on most. It all happens on your device, so even a full manuscript stays private and the page keeps working if your connection drops.
.txt file onto it, or hit Sample text to see the tool in action.Counting words sounds basic, but it settles a lot of everyday questions:
Working with longer text? Clean it up first with our Text Cleaner, count exact characters with the Character Counter, or browse the rest of our free text tools.
It splits your text on spaces and line breaks and counts the chunks that are left, which is the same approach Microsoft Word and Google Docs use. A hyphenated term like "well-known" counts as one word, and "don't" stays one word too, so the totals line up with what your word processor reports.
For ordinary prose, yes — you'll typically see the exact same number. Small differences can crop up around unusual symbols, code, or strings of numbers, since every program draws the line between "word" and "not a word" slightly differently, but for essays, articles, and emails the counts match.
Reading time assumes an average silent reading speed of about 200 words per minute, and speaking time uses roughly 130 words per minute, which is a comfortable presentation pace. Both are estimates — your own speed will vary — but they're handy for sizing up an article or a script at a glance.
Sentences are counted by the periods, question marks, and exclamation points that end them. Paragraphs are blocks of text separated by a blank line, while the line count tallies every non-empty line. If your text uses single line breaks instead of blank lines, the line count is usually the figure you want.
No. There's no cap on how much text you can paste in. Because the counting runs in your browser, very large documents lean on your device's memory, but a normal article or even a book chapter is handled instantly.
Yes. Every count happens locally in your browser with JavaScript. Your text is never uploaded to a server, saved, or logged, and the tool keeps working offline once the page has loaded.