Word & Character Counter

How each count works

Words are the pieces of text separated by spaces or line breaks, so a hyphenated word, a number such as 3.5 or a web address each count as one. Characters include every space and line break, and the no-spaces figure removes all whitespace. Paragraphs are blocks of text separated by a blank line.

Example

The sentence "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog." is 9 words, 44 characters (36 without spaces), 1 sentence and 1 paragraph, with a reading time under a minute.

Limits worth knowing

• Reading time is shown as "< 1 min" until the text passes 200 words, then rounded to the nearest minute.
• Languages written without spaces between words, such as Chinese or Japanese, are counted as very few words, so use the character count instead.
• Characters are counted as UTF-16 units, so some emoji count as two. A platform with a character limit may count them differently.

How reading time is estimated

Reading time is calculated at 200 words per minute, a commonly used average adult silent-reading speed. Actual reading speed varies by content difficulty and individual reader, so treat this as a rough guide rather than an exact figure.

Common uses

• Checking an essay or article against a word count requirement
• Estimating how long a blog post or script will take to read aloud
• Fitting text to a character limit for a social media post or meta description

Worked examples and their edge cases

The two-paragraph text "Two lines." and then, after a blank line, "A second paragraph here." gives 6 words, 36 characters (30 without spaces), 2 sentences and 2 paragraphs. A sentence is counted wherever a full stop, question mark or exclamation mark is followed by white space or the end of the text, so "Dr. Smith paid $3.50 today." counts as 2 sentences because of the abbreviation, while the decimal point in 3.50 is ignored. "Wait... what?!" is also 2, since a run of marks counts once. Text with no end punctuation, such as "hello world", counts as 1 sentence.

Reading time uses 200 words per minute and rounds to the nearest whole minute: 200 words show 1 min, 300 words show 2 mins because 1.5 rounds up, 450 words show 2 mins, and 1,000 words show 5 mins. Anything under 200 words shows "< 1 min". Extra blank lines do not add paragraphs: "one two", "three", then three blank lines and "four" is 4 words in 2 paragraphs. A single emoji counts as 2 characters but 1 word.