Count words and characters online

How it works

1. 1

   Paste or type your text.

2. 2

   Read the word, character, sentence and line counts.

3. 3

   Check the estimated reading time.

About the Word Counter

Essays, product descriptions, meta descriptions and social posts often have word or character limits, and a word processor is not always to hand. This counter reports the words, characters with and without spaces, sentences and lines in any text you paste, along with an estimated reading time based on 200 words per minute.

What you can do

• Count words, separated by any spaces, tabs or line breaks.
• Count characters with spaces and without them.
• Count sentences ending in a full stop, question mark or exclamation mark, and count lines.
• Estimate reading time, rounded up to the next minute.

When it works best

• Keeping an assignment, abstract or cover letter within a word limit.
• Checking a product title or description against a marketplace character limit.
• Estimating how long a blog post or talk script takes to read.

Things to know

• Your text is counted in your browser and is not stored.
• Anything between spaces counts as a word, including numbers, URLs and lone dashes, so totals can differ slightly from Word or Google Docs.
• Abbreviations such as e.g. or Dr. can inflate the sentence count, and an emoji may count as two characters.
• For an exact breakdown of characters and bytes, use the Unicode Character Inspector. To tidy spacing first, use the Whitespace Cleaner.

Frequently asked questions