Word Counter — Free Online Tool
Paste or type your text to instantly count words, characters, sentences, and paragraphs — plus an estimated reading time. Perfect for essays, posts, and manuscripts.
What is the Word Counter?
Word counts are gatekeepers: school essays demand 500 words, X posts allow 280 characters, novels target 80,000 words, and meta descriptions get cut off around 155 characters. Counting by hand is miserable; counting instantly lets you focus on writing.
This tool counts words (whitespace-separated tokens), characters with and without spaces, sentences (by terminal punctuation), and non-empty paragraphs. The reading-time estimate assumes ~200 words per minute, the average adult silent-reading speed. Everything runs locally in your browser — your text is never uploaded anywhere.
How to use this calculator
- Paste or type your text into the box.
- Click Count (or just watch — it also updates as you type).
- Read the stats: words, characters, sentences, paragraphs, reading time.
Formula
Frequently asked questions
Does it count hyphenated words as one or two?
One — hyphenated compounds with no spaces count as a single token.
Is my text uploaded to a server?
No. All counting happens locally in your browser; nothing leaves your device.
What is a good reading time estimate based on?
~200 words per minute, the widely cited average for adult silent reading.
Does it work for other languages?
Word and character counts work for any language using spaces; sentence detection is tuned for Latin punctuation.