Word Counter
Paste any text to instantly count words, characters, sentences, paragraphs, lines, and estimated reading and speaking time. Updates live as you type.
What gets counted
Words
Splits on any whitespace sequence. Handles multiple spaces, tabs, and newlines correctly.
Characters
Total character count including spaces, punctuation, and newlines — same as text.length.
Characters (no spaces)
Non-whitespace characters only. Useful for platforms with character limits that exclude spaces.
Lines
Count of newline-separated lines. An empty file returns 0; a single line with no newline returns 1.
Sentences
Counted by terminal punctuation: periods, exclamation marks, question marks. Ellipses count once.
Paragraphs
Blocks of text separated by one or more blank lines. Single-line input with no blank lines = 1 paragraph.
Reading time
Estimated at 200 words per minute — the average silent reading speed for adults.
Speaking time
Estimated at 130 words per minute — typical comfortable speaking pace for presentations.
Frequently asked questions
How is reading time calculated?
Reading time uses an average silent reading speed of 200 words per minute (wpm). Research suggests adult readers typically fall in the 200–300 wpm range; 200 wpm is a conservative baseline that works for technical content where readers slow down to parse complex sentences. The result is rounded up to the nearest minute.
Does this tool store my text?
No. Everything runs entirely in your browser using JavaScript. Your text is never sent to any server, stored in a database, or logged. The page has no backend at all — it's static HTML and client-side JavaScript.
Why does the character count differ from what my word processor shows?
Different tools count differently. Some word processors count bytes rather than characters (important for Unicode: an emoji is 1 character but 4 bytes). Some exclude certain whitespace. This tool counts JavaScript string length, which counts Unicode code points — each emoji or accented character counts as 1.
How are sentences counted?
Sentences are counted by occurrences of terminal punctuation: . ! and ? (including runs like ... or !!). This is a heuristic — it doesn't handle edge cases like abbreviations (Dr. Smith counts as 2) or decimal numbers (3.14 counts as 1). For precise sentence parsing, a natural language processing library would be more accurate.
What counts as a paragraph?
A paragraph is any block of non-empty text separated by at least one blank line. Multiple blank lines between paragraphs still count as one separator. A document with no blank lines is counted as one paragraph regardless of length.
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