Word Counter

How to use the word counter

1. Type or paste your textClick into the box and start writing, or paste a draft from any document or email. Formatting is dropped; only the plain text is counted. Long documents of 50,000 words or more are fine.
2. Read the numbers as you goWords, characters with and without spaces, sentences, paragraphs, reading time and speaking time update while you type.
3. Check the length limitsEach bar fills as you approach a common limit, turns amber in the last 10% and red once you are over, showing by how much.
4. Look for repeated wordsThe keyword list shows your five most frequent words and their share of the text, so you can spot a word you lean on too often.

How long should it be?

Most length targets are conventions rather than hard rules, but they exist for a reason: readers skim, screens are small and search results have fixed space. These are the ranges editors and teachers most often work with.

If an assignment gives a limit such as “1,500 words, plus or minus 10%”, anything from 1,350 to 1,650 is inside it. Titles, reference lists and footnotes are often excluded, so check the brief before trimming good sentences.

How reading and speaking time are worked out

Reading time is the word count divided by 238 words per minute, the average silent reading speed for adults reading non-fiction in English found by a large 2019 review of 190 studies. Fiction is read a little faster, around 260 words per minute, and dense technical text more slowly. A 1,500-word article therefore takes about 6 minutes 18 seconds.

Speaking time uses about 140 words per minute, a comfortable pace for a presentation or a recorded voice-over. Conversational speech is quicker, often 150–160, while speeches with pauses for emphasis drop toward 120. If you need to fit a five-minute slot, aim for roughly 650–700 words and rehearse with a timer.

Both figures are estimates for a typical reader. Headings, lists and short paragraphs make text faster to take in; long sentences and unfamiliar terms slow it down.

What counts as a word here

A word is any run of letters or digits, in any alphabet. A few details decide the edge cases:

• Hyphens and apostrophes join. “Well-known”, “state-of-the-art” and “don’t” each count as one word.
• Numbers are words. “42”, “3.14”, “1,000” and “10:30” count as one word each; the separators inside a number don’t split it.
• Abbreviations stay whole. “e.g.”, “a.m.” and “U.S.” are one word each, and the dot after them, or after titles such as “Mr” and “Dr”, does not end the sentence.
• Dashes and slashes split. “and/or” is two words, as are words on either side of a spaced or unspaced dash (—).
• Symbols and emoji are not words, but they do count as characters, usually one each (the exceptions are covered below).
• Web addresses split at slashes. “https://example.com/page” counts as three words: “https”, “example.com” and “page”.

Sentences end at a full stop, question mark, exclamation mark or ellipsis followed by a space, and at a line break. Each non-empty line counts as a paragraph, which matches text pasted from most documents.

A worked example

Take this sentence: “The well-known U.S. author wrote 3.5 chapters—then stopped.” Here is how each number comes out.

• Words: 9. The, well-known, U.S., author, wrote, 3.5, chapters, then, stopped. The hyphenated word and the decimal each stay whole, while the unspaced dash between “chapters” and “then” separates them.
• Characters: 59, which includes the 7 spaces, the dash and the closing full stop. Without spaces: 52.
• Sentences: 1. The dot in “U.S.” belongs to the abbreviation, so it does not end the sentence.
• Reading time: about 2 seconds, since 9 words at 238 words per minute is 0.038 minutes.

A program that treats the unspaced dash as part of a word would report 8 words for the same sentence. A single convention like that is behind most small disagreements between counters, which is why the rules above are spelled out.

Characters are not always what they seem

For ordinary text, one character is one letter, digit, space or punctuation mark. Underneath, text is stored as Unicode code points, and a handful of symbols are built from several of them. This counter counts code points, while other software sometimes counts 16-bit units instead, and the two disagree on emoji.

Text messages follow a third rule. A message written only in the basic GSM alphabet holds 160 characters, but one character from outside it, such as an emoji or a curly apostrophe (’) pasted from a document, switches the whole message to an encoding that holds only 70 units, and each emoji uses 2 of them. A few symbols in the basic alphabet’s extension, { } [ ] ~ \ | ^ and €, stay in the 160 encoding but count as 2 each. The SMS bar above switches automatically when that happens, so if it suddenly drops to 70, look for a stray curly quote or symbol.

Trimming text to a word limit

When a draft runs long, deleting whole sentences is rarely the best first move. Wordy phrases hide in almost every draft, and swapping them out keeps every point intact.

Other dependable cuts: drop intensifiers such as “very” and “really”, and turn passive sentences active. “The report was written by the team” (7 words) becomes “The team wrote the report” (5 words). Removing five words from each paragraph of a 20-paragraph essay saves 100 words without losing a single idea.

What a word count can’t tell you

A count measures length, not clarity. Two 300-word texts can take very different effort to read if one is full of long sentences and technical terms. A quick check is average sentence length: divide the word count by the sentence count. Around 15 to 20 words per sentence reads comfortably for a general audience; above 25, readers start to lose the thread, so split the longest sentences first.

The counter also counts everything in the box. Headings, captions, footnotes and reference lists all add to the total here, while many courses and publishers leave them out of an official limit. Paste only the body text, or subtract those parts, before you compare against a requirement.