Word Counter
Count words, characters, sentences, and paragraphs, and see reading time, speaking time, and top keywords — instantly, entirely inside your browser.
What is a Word Counter?
A word counter breaks a piece of text down into the numbers that matter for writing to a limit or a deadline: how many words, characters, sentences, and paragraphs it contains, and how long it would take an average reader to read it or a speaker to say it out loud. It updates as you type or paste, so there's no need to run a separate word count command or open the text in another program just to check.
It's built for anyone writing against a constraint: students meeting an essay word count, writers keeping a social post under a character limit, speakers timing a talk to a slot, and editors checking that a paragraph or sentence isn't running too long.
GuideHow to use it
How the counts are calculated
Words are counted by splitting the text on whitespace, so hyphenated words and contractions count as one word each. Sentences are detected by looking for sentence-ending punctuation — periods, question marks, and exclamation points — which is a good approximation but can occasionally miscount abbreviations like "e.g." or "Dr." as sentence breaks. Paragraphs are counted as blocks of text separated by a blank line, and lines count every line break, including empty ones. Reading and speaking time are both estimated by dividing the word count by a words- per-minute rate — 200 wpm by default for reading, which you can adjust, and a fixed 130 wpm for speaking, close to an average spoken pace.
Why it helpsFeatures & benefits
Why this runs entirely in your browser
Whatever gets typed or pasted here — a draft, a private message, unpublished writing — stays in the tab. All the counting and analysis run in JavaScript locally, so nothing is ever uploaded, logged, or sent to a server, and it keeps working offline once the page has loaded.
Getting an accurate count
Word and character limits set by a platform or a style guide don't always count the same way — some editors count a hyphenated word as one word, others as two, and some character limits include spaces while others don't. When a count needs to match a specific platform exactly, it's worth checking that platform's own counter against this one on a short sample first.
Frequently asked questions
A few things people usually want to know before trusting the numbers.
The text is split on whitespace, and each resulting chunk counts as one word, including hyphenated words and contractions.
It's an estimate based on word count divided by a reading speed you can adjust — actual reading time varies by content difficulty and individual pace.
It excludes very frequent words like "the," "and," and "of" from the top keywords list, so the list surfaces more meaningful, topic-specific words.
Yes. Use the Upload .txt button to load a plain text file directly into the counter.
No. All counting happens locally in your browser. Nothing typed or uploaded here is sent to a server, stored, or shared.