Word and Character Counter

How to use Word Counter

1. 1
   Paste or type your text. Every count updates on each keystroke.
2. 2
   Read the counts. Words, characters, sentences, paragraphs and reading time all at once.
3. 3
   Toggle spaces. Character limits sometimes exclude spaces — switch to see that figure.

About counting words

Word counts sound objective and are not quite. Different tools disagree, and the disagreements are systematic rather than random. Whitespace splitting — the method here and in most word processors — counts a hyphenated compound as one word and an em-dash-joined pair as one or two depending on spacing. Some systems count numbers as words and others exclude them. Legal and academic limits often specify a particular tool precisely because of this, and a submission rejected for length has usually been measured somewhere else. Character counts diverge for a subtler reason: what a character is. A great many platforms count UTF-16 code units, so anything outside the basic multilingual plane — most emoji, some scripts — counts as two. That is why a message that looks well within a limit can be rejected, and why a name with an accent behaves differently depending on whether it was typed as one code point or as a letter plus a combining mark. Reading time is the softest figure of all. It assumes silent reading of ordinary prose by a fluent adult; dense technical writing runs at half the rate, and anything read aloud is slower still.

Frequently asked questions