Word Counter & Character Counter
Count words, characters, sentences, paragraphs, and estimated reading time. Your work stays on this device whenever possible.
How to use Word Counter & Character Counter
- Paste or type into the "Your text" box; the ten tiles (Words, Characters, Without spaces, Sentences, Paragraphs, Avg words/sentence and the rest) refresh on every keystroke.
- Set "Reading speed (WPM)" (default 200) and "Speaking speed (WPM)" (default 130) to your own pace, then watch the Reading time and Speaking time tiles change.
- Tick "Ignore pure numbers in word count" when figures such as 2024 or 15 should not be counted as words.
- Leave "Filter common stop words in density" checked so the keyword list shows meaningful terms, then read the top ten words with their percentages.
- Press "Export summary (TXT)" for the tile values or "Export density (CSV)" for the keyword table.
Worked example
Enter "Stay hungry. Stay foolish." The tiles show Words 4, Characters 26, Without spaces 23, Sentences 2, Paragraphs 1 and Avg words/sentence 2.0. At 200 WPM the Reading time is 1 sec; at 130 WPM the Speaking time is 2 sec (4 / 130 x 60 = 1.85, rounded). The keyword box lists "stay" first with 2 (50.0%).
When to use this tool
- Checking a meta description or bio against a character ceiling using the Characters tile.
- Timing a three-minute talk by setting Speaking speed to your real delivery pace.
- Trimming an essay to a word limit without counting the years and figures in it.
Important limitations
Hyphenated words, emoji, abbreviations, and languages without spaces do not have one universal counting rule. Treat the count as an editorial aid, not a contractual word count.
Frequently asked questions
How does the tool decide what counts as a word?
Any run of letters or digits is one word, and an apostrophe or hyphen inside it keeps the token together, so "well-known" and "don't" each count once. Standalone symbols and emoji are ignored, and languages written without spaces will be undercounted.
How are sentences and paragraphs counted?
Sentences are counted from ending punctuation (period, question mark, exclamation mark) followed by whitespace or the end of the text, so abbreviations like "e.g." can inflate the total. A paragraph is a block separated by at least one blank line.
What do Reading ease and Grade level mean?
They apply the Flesch Reading Ease and Flesch-Kincaid formulas with a rule-of-thumb English syllable counter. Ease is clamped between 0 and 100, higher meaning simpler, and grade never drops below 1. Both stay at a dash until the text contains a sentence-ending mark.
Why might the character count differ from another counter?
"Characters" counts Unicode code points, so one emoji is one character. Some counters count UTF-16 units and report two. "Without spaces" removes every whitespace character, including tabs and line breaks.
How is keyword density calculated?
Each word's occurrences are divided by the total word count after the number filter, not after stop words are removed. Single-letter words are skipped, ties are listed alphabetically, and only the ten most frequent appear. For phrases, use the Word Frequency tool.