Word Counter

What is a word counter?

A word counter is a tool that tells you how much text you have written. At minimum it reports words and characters; a good one also reports sentences, paragraphs, how long the text takes to read aloud, and which phrases you repeat. It exists because almost every piece of writing is written to a limit — a 500-word essay, a 160-character meta description, a 2,000-word feature, a 150-word abstract — and guessing is a poor substitute for counting.

This one is a browser tool. There is no account, no upload, and no daily quota. You open the page, type or paste, and the numbers are already there.

How this word counter works

Most online counters split text on spaces. That works for English and quietly fails everywhere else: Chinese and Japanese do not put spaces between words at all, so a space-splitter reports a whole paragraph as one word. Thai does the same. Devanagari, Tamil and Arabic have their own clustering rules that a naive regular expression gets wrong.

This counter uses Intl.Segmenter, the Unicode segmentation built into your browser, with the language you choose in the toolbar. That is the same ICU library word processors and operating systems use, so Chinese is segmented into actual words, Hindi conjuncts stay whole, and an Arabic sentence ending in ؟ is recognised as a sentence.

Three more decisions are worth knowing about, because they change the numbers:

• Hyphenated words count as one. well-known and state-of-the-art are single words, as they are in Word and Google Docs. So are contractions like don't.
• Characters are counted as you see them. An emoji, a flag, or a Devanagari conjunct such as क्षि is one character here, even though each is several code points underneath. Counters that report the raw length disagree with what is on your screen.
• Abbreviations do not end sentences. "Dr. Smith went home." is one sentence, not two — and a sentence that starts in lower case is still counted, because people write that way.

What the metrics mean

Every derived figure on this page comes from a stated assumption, and you can change all of them in Timing assumptions.

• Reading time assumes silent reading of non-fiction. The default rates are per-language and come from Brysbaert's 2019 meta-analysis of reading speed: 238 words per minute for English, 278 for Spanish, 260 for German, 214 for French. Portuguese and Hindi are not covered by that analysis, so we use approximate figures — 240 and 200 — and label them as approximate.
• Speaking time assumes 130 words per minute, a comfortable presentation pace. Reading a script aloud quickly runs faster; a nervous first take runs slower.
• Handwriting time assumes 20 words per minute of sustained longhand.
• Pages assumes 500 words on a single-spaced 12pt page, and 250 double-spaced — the convention most course handbooks use. Your own template may differ.
• Average sentence length is words divided by sentences. It is the single most useful number on the page for prose: much above 25 and readers start to lose the thread.
• Readability uses Flesch Reading Ease and Flesch–Kincaid Grade Level. Both formulas count English syllables, so we report them for English only and say so plainly for other languages rather than printing a number that would not mean anything.

Word counting for students and essays

Most assignments allow a margin of about ten per cent either side of the stated limit, but the rules differ by institution and you should check yours. What is nearly universal is that the limit refers to the body of the essay. Title pages, reference lists, appendices and footnotes are usually excluded, so paste only the body here if you want the number your marker will use.

Two habits make the limit easier to live with. Draft long and cut — it is far easier to remove a weak paragraph than to invent a strong one at 2am. And check the word count per section rather than only at the end; a 2,000-word essay with a 900-word introduction has a structural problem that a total count will not reveal.

For a rough sense of scale: 500 words is about one single-spaced page, 1,000 words is two, and a 200-word abstract is a little under half a page.

For writers, bloggers and content teams

If you write for the web, three of these numbers matter more than the total. Average sentence length predicts how a draft will feel on a phone. Keyword frequency shows what you have actually written about, which is often not what you set out to write about. And reading time is the figure readers use to decide whether to start.

The keyword panel reports single words and two- and three-word phrases with their density — the share of the total word count each phrase occupies. Treat it as a mirror, not a target. Density has not been a ranking factor for many years, and writing to hit a percentage produces text that reads like it was written to hit a percentage. What the panel is genuinely good for is catching the word you have used eleven times without noticing.

Counting words in other languages

Pick your language in the toolbar above the editor and the segmentation changes with it. There are 29 to choose from, including Hindi, Bengali, Marathi, Tamil, Telugu, Gujarati, Kannada, Malayalam, Punjabi, Urdu, Arabic, Persian, Hebrew, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Thai and Vietnamese.

For Chinese and Japanese, note that "words" and "characters" are genuinely different questions. Publishers and universities in those languages usually specify a character count (字数), which is the second figure on this page. The word count is still useful for translation estimates, where the source word count drives the quote.

The interface itself is available in Hindi, Spanish, French, German, European Portuguese and Brazilian Portuguese, with the page copy and questions translated rather than machine-swapped. The two Portuguese pages are separate translations, not one text served twice.

Your text stays in your browser

Counting happens entirely on your device. The page loads once, and from then on every calculation runs in JavaScript in your own browser — there is no request carrying your text to a server, because there does not need to be one. You can confirm this by opening your browser's network tab and typing: nothing is sent.

That has a practical consequence beyond privacy. The counter keeps working with no connection at all, which matters if you are writing on a train or in an exam hall with the wifi off.

The same is true of the grammar checker. It downloads its dictionary and rules once, then checks your writing on your own machine — so there is no exception to make here, and nothing you write is uploaded anywhere.

From counting to correcting

A word count tells you whether a draft is the right length. It cannot tell you whether the draft is any good. When the length is settled, run the text through the grammar checker: it flags grammar, spelling and punctuation mistakes, explains each one in a sentence, and lets you accept or dismiss suggestions one at a time rather than rewriting your paragraph for you.