Word Counter

Type in the box above, paste text from anywhere, or drop a file on it. Every number updates as you write: words, characters with spaces, characters without spaces, sentences and paragraphs sit in the four tiles at the top, and the panel beside the box adds reading time, speaking time and a list of details. There is no Count button and nothing to wait for.

This word counter online works in any modern browser on a phone, tablet or computer. Typed text is counted on your own device and is not sent anywhere. Tick Keep my text in this browser and the box is filled again the next time you open the page, so a draft is not lost if you close the tab.

Under the box are two more cards. Keyword density lists the words and phrases you use most, and Goal or limit draws a progress bar toward a word goal or a character limit. Preset buttons set common limits in one click, from a 500-word essay to a 280-character post.

A word here is a run of letters or digits. Spaces, line breaks and punctuation separate words, and anything with no letter or digit in it, such as a dash, an ampersand or an emoji on its own, is not a word. Word boundaries come from your browser's built-in text segmenter, Intl.Segmenter, which knows the word rules of many languages.

Two joins are kept together on purpose. A hyphenated word such as well-known or mother-in-law counts as one word, and a contraction such as don't, it's or we'll counts as one word, with a straight or a curly apostrophe. That matches how most style guides and word processors treat them.

Numbers count as words too: 2026, 1,000 and 3.5 are one word each, so a sentence like We met 3 times in 2025 has six words. A currency sign or percent sign next to a number is not counted, but the number itself is.

Most of the time the count here matches Microsoft Word and Google Docs exactly, but on some texts it is off by a few words. That is not an error in either tool; each one draws the line between words slightly differently.

Dashes are the usual cause. Word processors mostly split words at spaces, so two words joined by an em dash with no spaces (yes—no) can count as one word there and as two here. Slashes behave the same way: and/or may be one word in one tool and two in another.

Hidden parts of a document are the second cause. When you copy and paste, footnotes, text boxes, headers, footers and comments are often left behind, while the document's own count may include or skip them depending on its settings. Uploading a DOCX reads the body text; headers and footers are left out.

Characters can differ too. Here a line break counts as one character in the with-spaces figure, and characters are counted as Unicode code points, so an emoji built from several pieces, such as a flag or a family, can count as more than one. Some sites, including X, weight characters their own way, so when you are right at the limit, trust the site's own counter.

Most character limits online count everything, spaces included. A meta description, a text message, a social post and most web form fields measure the full length of what you type, so the Characters tile marked with spaces is the number to watch. A word counter with spaces in the character total gives you the figure those limits actually check.

Spaces add up quickly. In ordinary English roughly one character in six is a space, so a 1,000-character paragraph has around 830 characters without them. Line breaks count as characters too; if a form strips them, its count can end up a little lower than ours.

Translators, some publishers and some school assignments price or limit text by characters without spaces, because spaces are not content. The second Characters tile, marked without spaces, removes every space, tab and line break before counting. Letters, digits, punctuation marks and symbols all stay in.

If you came looking for a word counter without spaces, that tile is the one you want; the word total itself never includes spaces, since spaces only separate words. Selected text gets the same split: the line under the box shows words, characters and characters without spaces for whatever you highlight.

Choose Character limit in the Goal or limit card, or click one of the presets, and the box becomes a character counter with spaces and a live progress bar. The bar turns red once you go over, and the line beneath it says how many characters to cut.

The SMS limit of 160 applies to plain Latin text. A message with an emoji or a letter outside the basic SMS alphabet is sent in a different encoding and splits at 70 characters, so keep texts plain when length matters. Search engines cut titles and descriptions by pixel width rather than an exact number of characters, so treat 60 and 160 as safe targets rather than hard rules. You can also type any other number into the goal box.

Reading time divides the word count by a reading speed. The default is 238 words per minute, the average silent reading speed for adults found in a large 2019 review of reading studies, and you can change it in the Read speed box to anything from 50 to 1,000. Slow it down for technical text or young readers; speed it up for light reading.

That makes the page a word counter with reading time built in, useful for blog posts, newsletters and reports that show a minutes-to-read label. Times are rounded to the nearest second and shown in minutes and seconds, or in hours and minutes for long texts.

Handwriting time uses 13 words per minute, a typical pace for neat handwriting, so you can tell how long an exam answer or a handwritten letter will take to write out.

Speaking time divides your word count by the pace you choose: Slow 120 wpm, Average 150 wpm or Fast 180 wpm. Most people giving a prepared talk land near 150 words per minute. Nerves tend to push them faster, while pauses for slides, laughs and questions slow them down.

To use the page as a word counter for speech planning, work backwards from your time slot. Multiply the minutes you have by your pace and aim a little under, because real talks almost always run longer than the estimate. Read one paragraph aloud against a timer, then pick the speed that matches you.

Wedding toasts, eulogies, class presentations, podcast scripts and video voice-overs all work the same way. For a video you can upload its SRT subtitle file and the text is read in, though cue numbers and timestamps are counted as numbers, so the total runs a little high.

Click Essay 500 words, Essay 1,000 words or Common App essay 650 in the Goal or limit card, or choose Word goal and type your own target. The progress bar fills as you write, the line under it says how many words are left, and it shows goal reached once you get there. With a word goal the bar simply stays full if you go past, so keep an eye on the number itself when a limit is strict.

A word counter for essay work is most useful with the details panel beside it. Average sentence and Longest sentence show where the writing drags, Unique words hints at repetition, and the page estimates help when a teacher sets a length in pages rather than words: about 500 words a page single spaced and 250 double spaced.

Check the rules your school or application uses. Some count the title and references and some do not, so paste only the parts that count, or select them to see their total on its own.

Click Upload file or drop a file on the box to count a document without opening it. The text is pulled out, placed in the box and counted like anything you type, so you can edit it, select parts of it and copy it back out. Files up to 50 MB are accepted.

Most formats are read entirely in your browser. DOC, ODT and RTF files are the exception: they are first turned into DOCX on our server, then read in your browser, and the uploaded copy is deleted straight after.

A word counter for documents is handy when a form asks for a word count but all you have is the file: a report, a thesis chapter, a cover letter or a client brief. If you need the document in another format afterwards, Word to PDF and PDF to Word convert it in a few seconds.

Upload a PDF and the text layer of every page is read in your browser, page by page. Line breaks inside the PDF are kept and each page starts a new paragraph, so the paragraph count is a little higher than in the original document.

A scanned PDF is a picture of each page with no text layer, so it counts as zero words. Save the pages as images with PDF to JPG, turn them into text with Image to Text, then paste the result here. For a PDF that does have text, PDF to Text gives you a plain text file you can keep.

Using the page as a word counter for pdf files has one quirk to know about: a word broken across two lines with a hyphen, such as exam- and ple, counts as two words, so the total can run slightly high on PDFs with narrow columns.

Once the text has at least 30 words and is mostly English letters, the details panel shows two readability scores. Reading ease runs from 0 to 100, where higher is easier, and a short label explains it. Grade level estimates the US school grade a reader needs to follow the text comfortably.

Both scores use the classic Flesch formulas, which look only at sentence length in words and word length in syllables. Syllables are estimated from vowel groups, so unusual names and abbreviations can be off by one, but across a whole text the estimate evens out.

To raise the score, split long sentences and swap long words for short ones where the meaning stays the same. A lot of web copy reads well around 60 to 70. A low score is not always a problem: legal and scientific writing is dense by nature.

The Keyword density card lists your 15 most used words, with how many times each appears and its share of all words. Switch Phrase length to 2 words or 3 words to see repeated phrases instead; a phrase only appears once it is used at least twice.

Skip common words (the, and, of…) is on by default, so filler such as the, and, is and of does not crowd the list. For longer phrases the filter drops a phrase that starts or ends with a common word, so a phrase such as cost of living still shows. Untick it to see every word.

Density is the phrase's count times its length, divided by the total number of words. Writers use it to catch a word they repeat without noticing; editors use it to check that a page is about what it says it is about, without one phrase stuffed into every line.

Not every language puts spaces between words. Because the counter uses Intl.Segmenter, Hindi, Thai and other scripts are split into real words instead of being counted by spaces alone.

For Chinese and Japanese, each character counts as one word. This is the convention Microsoft Word uses, and it is how length limits in those languages are usually given. Japanese kana count the same way.

Readability scores are only shown for English, because the Flesch formulas and the syllable estimate are built for English. Keyword density works in any language, and Skip common words also leaves out a few frequent Hindi particles.

This is a word counter free to use as often as you like: no account, no sign-up and no fixed limit on how much text you paste into the box.

Everything you type or paste is counted by code running in your browser, and none of it is sent to us. TXT, Markdown, HTML, CSV, SRT, DOCX and PDF files are read on your device too. Only DOC, ODT and RTF files go to our server, to be turned into DOCX, and they are deleted after conversion.

Keep my text in this browser saves your draft in this browser's local storage so it is still there next time. Untick it and the saved copy is removed. Your settings, such as reading speed and goal, are remembered either way. On a shared computer, untick the box or press Clear before you leave.

Finished writing? Turn the document into a file anyone can open with Word to PDF, or pull the text out of a PDF you received with PDF to Text. Need a strong password for the account you are submitting to? Password Generator makes one in your browser.