Words, characters, reading time
Live counting in your browser. Words, characters (with and without spaces), sentences, paragraphs, and an estimated reading time at 220 wpm. Paste an article, an essay, or your manuscript — nothing leaves your device.
About word counting
This tool counts words, characters (with and without spaces), sentences, paragraphs, and estimates reading time for any text you paste. Everything runs in your browser — your text never leaves the page.
How a word is counted
A word is any contiguous sequence of non-whitespace characters. "It's" is one word; "well-known" is one word; "U.S." is one word. Numbers count as words. Punctuation alone does not. We use a Unicode-aware whitespace boundary, so multi-byte scripts (Cyrillic, Greek, accented Latin) are handled correctly.
Reading-time methodology
We use 238 words per minute, drawn from Brysbaert's 2019 meta-analysis of 145 silent-reading studies. This is faster than the often-quoted 200 wpm but more accurate for average adult readers of digital text. Technical writing reads slower (~180 wpm); casual prose faster (~280 wpm). For audio narration, halve it to ~150 wpm.
Character counts: with vs. without spaces
"Characters" includes letters, numbers, punctuation, and whitespace. "Characters without spaces" excludes whitespace but counts other punctuation. Twitter's 280-character limit counts with spaces; SMS's 160-character limit counts with spaces; LinkedIn post limits count with spaces. Always check which limit you are measuring against.
Related tools and limits
For language detection or translation, this tool does not include those — it counts what you paste. For non-whitespace-separated languages (Chinese, Japanese, Thai), character count is the more meaningful metric. Need a passphrase from your text? Use the Password Generator.