Paste your text for an instant count of words, characters, sentences and paragraphs — plus reading and speaking time. Runs entirely in your browser; nothing is ever uploaded.
Counts update keystroke-by-keystroke, fully in your browser. No lag, no upload, works without internet.
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Tweets, essays, meta descriptions, abstracts — see exactly where you stand against any word or character cap.
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Check it for AIMost writing apps tuck a word count into a status bar where it's easy to ignore. This tool puts six numbers in front of you at once and keeps them current as you type. You get the word count, characters with spaces, characters without spaces, sentence and paragraph totals, and an estimate of how long the piece takes to read aloud or silently — plus the longest single word, which is a quick tell for a stray URL or an accidental run-together.
The reason for two character figures trips a lot of people up. "Characters" counts everything you typed, spaces and line breaks included. "No spaces" strips the whitespace out. Which one matters depends entirely on where the text is going: a meta description budget counts the spaces, while some ad platforms and legacy form fields quietly ignore them. Seeing both side by side means you never have to guess which rule a given box is using.
A word, here, is any run of non-space characters bounded by whitespace — the same convention Microsoft Word and Google Docs use. That keeps the totals comparable to the count your professor or editor sees on their end. It also means "well-known" and "twenty-one" register as one word each, and an em dash glued between two words without spaces can momentarily read as one long token until you space it out.
Sentences are found by tracking terminal punctuation — periods, question marks, exclamation points — so most ordinary prose splits cleanly. Paragraphs are counted from the blank lines between blocks of text. The reading and speaking estimates are simple math on the word total: silent reading assumes 250 words per minute, speaking assumes 130, a relaxed pace for reading something out loud. They're meant for planning a talk or gauging a blog post, not for timing a script to the second.
All of this runs in JavaScript inside your own browser tab. Nothing you paste is sent to a server or stored, which is genuinely true of this counter — so a confidential draft, an unpublished manuscript or a client's NDA'd copy stays on your machine. It also means the counts keep working with the network off.
Writing to a limit is its own small discipline, and the people who do it most tend to keep a counter open in a second tab:
If this counter and another app show different totals for the same text, it's almost never a bug — it's a difference in rules. Some counters treat a number like "1,000" as one word; others split on the comma. Headers, footnotes and tracked changes may or may not be included depending on the editor. Hyphens, slashes and pasted formatting all nudge the number a little. When a limit is strict, count in the same place you'll submit, or leave yourself a few words of slack.
A couple of small habits help, too. The reading and speaking times are averages, so a dense technical passage will run slower than the estimate and a list of short lines faster — treat them as a ballpark. And pasting from a styled document can carry invisible characters that bump the no-spaces figure; if a number looks off by a hair, retype the suspect bit. This counter stays free with no cap and no signup, so you can lean on it as often as a deadline demands.