Word Counter

How words and characters are counted

This word count tool works as a word counter and a character counter at the same time, in any language. Text is split into words using the same Unicode rules for every language, so accented and Turkish letters such as é, ç, ğ and ş count as single characters. Apostrophes do not split a word, so "don't" and the Turkish "Ankara'da" are one word each. Hyphenated words such as "well-known" count as one word. Numbers count as words; punctuation and emoji do not. In languages written without spaces, such as Chinese and Japanese, words are split with the browser's dictionary, so the count is an estimate.

The character count includes every letter, digit and symbol you see, plus spaces. Characters without spaces leaves out spaces, tabs and line breaks. If a contest, magazine or form gives you a character limit, check which of the two it means.

Sentence and paragraph counter

Sentences are separated by sentence-ending punctuation such as periods, exclamation marks, question marks and ellipses. A line without punctuation, such as a heading, counts as its own sentence. An abbreviation like "Dr." followed by a capitalized word may add one to the count, so treat the sentence count as a close estimate.

The paragraph counter treats every line that contains text as a paragraph. When you paste from Word or Google Docs, each paragraph is already its own line, and empty lines are not counted.

Reading time calculator

Reading time is your word count divided by an average reading speed. We use an average of 200 words per minute for silent reading and 130 words per minute for reading aloud, whatever language the text is in.

These are rounded averages. Real speed varies by language: in languages whose words carry suffixes, such as Turkish, words are longer and fewer are read per minute, while English tends to be a little faster. The reader and the difficulty of the text matter too, so treat the result as an estimate for planning.

What your most frequent words show

The list shows the words you repeat most. You can hide common English and Turkish words such as "the", "and", "ve" and "bir", which brings forward the adjective you lean on without noticing, or a character name that appears on every page. Upper and lower case are grouped together, and words keep their endings, so "don't" stays "don't".

Your text stays on your device

The word counter runs entirely in your browser. Whatever you type or paste is never sent to a server, never saved and never included in analytics. When you close the page, the text is gone, so copy anything you want to keep into your own file.