Word Counter — Words, Characters, Sentences and Reading Time

How to use the word counter

1. Type or paste your text into the Your text box.
2. Read the counts as they update: words, characters, characters without spaces, sentences and paragraphs.
3. If you read faster or slower than average, change Reading speed (words per minute) to adjust the reading time.
4. Check the Top keywords table to see which words you lean on most.

What it does and when to use it

Many writing jobs come with a limit. Essays and abstracts have word limits, application forms cap answers, and editors commission articles at a set length. This tool gives you every count you are likely to be asked for in one place, so you can trim or expand with a clear target.

The reading and speaking times help when you plan a blog post or a talk. A 1,300-word script, for example, takes about 10 minutes to say aloud at 130 words per minute. The keyword table helps you spot a word you have used too often, which is useful for editing and for checking that a page is about what you think it is about.

If you need a character count checked against a platform limit, such as a meta description or an SMS, use the Character Counter, which shows how much room is left. To find repeated words across a long text, try the Duplicate Word Finder or Unique Words.

How it works

• Words are runs of letters and numbers. Hyphens and apostrophes inside a word keep it together, so “don’t” and “e-mail” are one word each.
• Characters are counted as you see them on screen. An emoji or an accented letter counts as one character, even if a computer stores it as several bytes.
• Sentences end at a full stop, question mark or exclamation mark.
• Paragraphs are blocks of text separated by a blank line.
• Reading time is words ÷ reading speed, shown in minutes and seconds. Speaking time is words ÷ 130.
• Keyword density is the number of times a word appears ÷ total words × 100.

Everything runs in your browser as you type.

Worked examples

A pangram. “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.” gives 9 words, 44 characters, 36 characters without spaces and 1 sentence. Every keyword appears once, so each has a density of 11.1%.

A short paragraph with repeats. “State-of-the-art tools work offline. Offline tools keep drafts private, and private drafts stay on your device.” gives 16 words and 2 sentences. The keyword table shows four words used twice each: drafts, offline, private and tools, each at 12.5% (2 ÷ 16). If this were a longer piece, that table would tell you to find a synonym for one of them.

Limits and tips

• Reading time is a guide. Dense technical writing is read more slowly and dialogue more quickly.
• The sentence count can be thrown off by abbreviations such as “e.g.” or “Dr.”, which contain full stops.
• Very large documents, in the hundreds of thousands of words, can make the live keyword table feel slow because it updates on every keystroke.
• To change the case of a heading after you finish, use the Case Converter. For letter-level detail, the Letter Frequency tool counts each letter.