How to use it

Type or paste into Your text. The counts update as you type, in your browser: Words, Characters, Without spaces, Sentences, Paragraphs, Lines and Avg word length. Below them are reading and speaking times and Most used words, the ten most frequent words.

Examples

A release note with a contraction, a compound, a time and a URL:

We don't ship on Fridays. The follow-up release goes out Monday at 9:00, see https://example.com/notes?v=2 for details.

Words           17
Characters      119
Without spaces  103
Sentences       2
Avg word length 5.9
4 s to read     7 s to say aloud

don't, follow-up, 9:00 and the URL are one word each, and the ? inside the URL doesn’t end a sentence.

A heading, a blank line, then two lines:

Release notes

Fixed the login bug.
Added dark mode.

This gives 2 paragraphs, 4 lines and 3 sentences. Only the blank line separates paragraphs, and a line break ends a sentence, so the heading counts as one.

A thousand words read in 4 min 12 s and take 6 min 40 s to say aloud.

Good to know

Words follow Unicode’s word rules (UAX #29, through the browser’s Intl.Segmenter). Numbers like 1,000 and 3.5 are one word each. Hyphenated compounds, times, URLs and email addresses are joined into one. Emoji and punctuation aren’t words. Chinese, Japanese and Thai are split with dictionaries: 我吃苹果。今天天气很好。 is 6 words.
Characters are what you see, not code units: 👍🏽 and 🇵🇱 count as one each, while JavaScript’s .length says 4. Without spaces also leaves out tabs and line breaks.
A full stop before a capital ends a sentence, so Mr. Smith met Dr. Jones. counts 3 sentences. Unicode’s default rules don’t know abbreviations.
A paragraph needs a blank line. Text that separates paragraphs with single line breaks counts as one paragraph; look at Lines instead. A final line break adds an empty last line.
Most used words ignores case and leaves out 60 common English words like the, and and of. Their share still counts against all words, so the column adds up to less than 100%. Ties are listed by code point, so digits come before letters.
Reading time uses 238 words a minute, the average for silent reading of English non-fiction in Marc Brysbaert’s 2019 meta-analysis, and speaking time uses 150.
The text is limited to 200,000 characters. Past that, the counts stay on the last text that fitted.

Questions

How do I count words in a text?

Paste it into the box: Words is the total. In a terminal, wc -w file.txt counts runs of non-space characters, so it agrees on most English prose but counts 我吃苹果。今天天气很好。 as one word.

Does the character count include spaces?

Characters does, along with line breaks; Without spaces leaves them out. Platforms count differently: X counts every URL as 23 characters, and one SMS holds 160 GSM-7 characters, or 70 once any character outside GSM-7, such as an emoji, appears.

How long does it take to read 1,000 words?

About 4 minutes at the average silent reading speed of 238 words a minute, and closer to 7 minutes aloud at 150.

Why doesn’t my count match Microsoft Word or Google Docs?

Because each tool decides differently what a word is. Microsoft Word splits at spaces, so and/or is one word there and two here. This tool splits at punctuation the way Unicode’s rules do, keeping the cases above whole.

Word Counter

Most used words