Word & Character Counter
Words, characters with and without spaces, sentences, paragraphs, lines, unique words, reading and speaking time at the rate you set, most frequent words.
Live counts as you type — words, characters, sentences, paragraphs — plus reading and speaking time from your own words-per-minute figure and a frequency table, all counted on your machine.
Example: Two short paragraphs count as 27 words, 149 characters (122 without spaces), 3 sentences and 24 unique words; at 200 wpm that is 8 seconds of reading.
What counts
as a word.
The counting rules, why two counters can disagree by a few percent, how sentences and paragraphs are found, and why the reading time is yours to set.
Words and characters
A word is a run of letters and digits, in any script, that may contain an apostrophe or hyphen between letters — so "don't" and "state-of-the-art" are one word each, "12.50" is two (12 and 50), and a lone dash is none. Characters are Unicode code points: an accented é or an emoji counts once, and the count without spaces drops every whitespace character. Chinese, Japanese and Korean text has no spaces, so each of its characters counts as a word for the time estimates, and the page says so.
Sentences, paragraphs, lines
A sentence ends at . ! ? or … when followed by a space or the end of the text — a decimal point or "e.g." in the middle of a sentence does not split it; an abbreviation at the end of a clause followed by a space does, which is the usual trade-off. Paragraphs are blocks separated by a blank line; lines are line breaks plus one.
Reading and speaking time
Time = words ÷ words per minute. The page starts with 200 wpm reading and 130 wpm speaking as editable fields, not as facts: adult silent-reading speeds reported in the literature span roughly 150–300 wpm depending on text and purpose, and speech rates vary by speaker and language. Set the figure that matches your audience.
What the tool does not settle
Word processors and platforms use their own rules (Word counts "12.50" as one word; Twitter/X counts characters with URL and CJK weighting), so counts can differ by a few percent — compare against the one that will judge you. Frequency lists are raw; no stop-word list is applied. Text up to 2 MB is counted on your machine; nothing is uploaded. The same four anonymous usage counts as the rest of the site apply.
SOURCES
- Unicode Standard Annex #29 — Text Segmentation (word boundaries, for comparison with the simpler rule used here)
- RFC 3629 — UTF-8 (byte size)
Last reviewed 18 September 2026. How results are checked: How we verify.