Type or paste into the box above and every statistic updates as you go: words, characters (with and without spaces), sentences, paragraphs, and estimated reading time. No signup, no “premium” limits — and your text never leaves your browser.
How to use it
- Paste your text (or start typing) in the box.
- Watch the counts update live below it — there’s no button to press.
- Edit in place until you hit your target, then copy your text back out.
When exact counts matter
Word and character limits are everywhere: college essays with strict word counts, meta descriptions that should stay between 150 and 160 characters, tweets and bios with hard caps, abstracts limited to 250 words, cover letters that shouldn’t cross a page. Writers use counters to hit article targets; students use them for assignments; translators bill by word; job applicants squeeze achievements into character-limited fields. Whatever the limit, watching the number move as you edit beats guessing.
What makes this counter accurate
Simple counters split text on spaces, which miscounts hyphenated words, smart punctuation, accented characters, and anything that isn’t English. This tool uses the Unicode text-segmentation standard built into your browser — the same rules professional text editors rely on — so naïve, check-in, and don’t each count once, and sentence detection is smart enough not to break on “Dr.” or “e.g.”. Characters are counted as real characters (code points), so an emoji counts as one, not two.
Limits and tips
- Reading time assumes 200 words per minute — a solid average for adult readers of general prose; halve it for dense technical material.
- Paragraphs are separated by blank lines, which matches how most editors and CMSs treat them.
- Counting book-length text is fine: a 300,000-word manuscript processes in well under a second on a typical laptop, because nothing is uploaded.
If you’re editing toward a limit, our other text tools can help clean things up, and the full tool collection covers PDFs and images with the same privacy guarantee. Need numbers instead of words? Try the calculators.
Private by design
There is no server behind this page’s counting — it is JavaScript running on your device. That’s why it works instantly, offline once loaded, and why pasting confidential drafts here is safe.