Word Counter

What the Word Counter does

The Word Counter gives you an instant, accurate breakdown of any piece of writing — word count, character count (with and without spaces), sentence count, paragraph count, and an estimated reading time. It updates live as you type or paste, so you can watch the numbers move as you edit down to a limit or pad out a draft.

How to use it

1. Paste or type your text into the box.
2. Watch the six stats update instantly: words, characters, characters without spaces, sentences, paragraphs, and reading time.
3. Use Clear to start over, or Copy text to grab what you've written.

Common uses

• Trimming an essay, cover letter, or assignment down to a strict word limit.
• Checking a meta description or headline stays inside its character budget.
• Estimating how long a blog post or script will take to read aloud.
• Confirming a social media caption fits a platform's character cap before posting.
• Tracking daily word counts while working on a longer manuscript.

Good to know

Reading time is calculated at roughly 200 words per minute, a standard adult silent-reading pace — if you're timing a speech or video script, expect real speaking pace to run slower, closer to 130–150 words per minute. Sentence and paragraph counts are estimated from punctuation and line breaks, so unusual formatting (like text with no punctuation) can throw those two numbers off slightly.

Word counting itself seems simple, but different tools define a "word" slightly differently — some count a hyphenated term as one word, others as two, and standalone numbers or symbols can be handled inconsistently across word processors. If a count here doesn't exactly match what Microsoft Word or Google Docs reports for the same text, that's usually why; the difference is rarely more than a percent or two and won't affect whether you're within a limit by any meaningful margin.