Word Counter
Count words, characters, sentences, and reading time as you type.
Written by Anil Gautam · Updated
What counts as a word, sentence and paragraph?
A word is any group of characters between spaces, tabs or line breaks. Hyphenated and contracted forms such as well-known and don't count once, a number like 2026 is a word, and so is a dash typed with spaces on both sides; a bulleted line such as "- item one" counts 3 words. Chinese and Japanese, written without spaces, count as one word per unbroken run.
Sentences end at a full stop, question mark or exclamation mark and also at every line break, and a piece only counts if it contains a letter or digit, so a line of dots does not. Paragraphs are counted per non-empty line, which means a single line break starts a new one: a poem of two two-line verses with a blank line between them counts 4 paragraphs and 4 sentences. Abbreviations inflate the sentence figure, so "Dr. Rao arrived at 5 p.m. today." counts 4.
Characters counts everything, spaces and line breaks included, and No spaces removes all whitespace first. Both use the browser's string length, so an emoji such as a smiley face adds 2.
How are reading and speaking times rounded?
Both times are rounded up to the next whole second. A 1,000-word article shows 4m 27s of reading time (1,000 divided by 225 is 4.44 minutes, or 266.7 seconds, rounded up to 267) and 6m 40s of speaking time (1,000 divided by 150 is exactly 400 seconds). For 450 words the figures land on whole minutes: 2m of reading and 3m of speaking.
Work backwards when you have a time slot. A 5-minute talk at 150 words a minute is 750 words, and the same 750 words take 3m 20s to read silently.
When does another counter fit better?
For posts on X, the Twitter / X Character Counter applies the platform's weights, counting every link as 23 and Chinese, Japanese and Korean characters as 2. Text copied from a PDF often arrives with a line break at the end of each visual line, which inflates the sentence and paragraph figures here; join the lines with Line Break Remover in Keep paragraphs mode first, or count sentences with Sentence Counter, which ignores line breaks.
Copy text copies the box contents and Clear empties it. Counting happens in your browser on every keystroke, and nothing you type is uploaded.