Word Counter
Paste an essay, a blog post or a cover letter and see the word count, characters, sentences, paragraphs, reading time and your most repeated words, updated with every keystroke.
81 words · 440 characters
Counts
Time and averages
Top keywords
| Word | Count | Share |
|---|---|---|
| goes | 2 | 2.5% |
| oven | 2 | 2.5% |
| bake | 1 | 1.2% |
| bakery | 1 | 1.2% |
| borrowed | 1 | 1.2% |
| come | 1 | 1.2% |
| complicated | 1 | 1.2% |
| day | 1 | 1.2% |
| early | 1 | 1.2% |
| every | 1 | 1.2% |
| fermentation | 1 | 1.2% |
| first | 1 | 1.2% |
| five | 1 | 1.2% |
| flour | 1 | 1.2% |
| focaccia | 1 | 1.2% |
Private by default
Your text is counted in this tab and never sent to us.
Reading and speaking time
Worked out at 238 and 150 words per minute.
Works in many languages
Chinese, Japanese and Thai are split into real words.
More than a word count
The number at the top is the one most people come for: how many words you've written. Teachers set limits in words, magazines pay by the word, and job portals cut off cover letters that run long. Next to it you get characters with and without spaces, sentences, paragraphs and lines, so you can check a word limit and a character limit in the same place.
Below the counts are two times. Reading time assumes 238 words per minute, a common figure for adults reading on a screen. Speaking time uses 150 words per minute, a relaxed pace for a talk or a podcast. A 1,500 word article comes out at about 6 minutes 18 seconds to read and 10 minutes to say out loud.
The keyword table lists the 15 words you use most, with how often each one appears and its share of all words. It's handy for spotting a word you lean on too much, like "really" turning up nine times on one page.
How to use it
- 1Type in the box, paste your text, or open a .txt, .md or .html file.
- 2Read the counts on the right. They change as you type.
- 3Check reading and speaking time if you're writing for a blog or a talk.
- 4Look at the top keywords, and turn off "Hide common words" if you want to see words like the and and too.
How the counting works
- Words are runs of letters and numbers. "It's" and "don't" are one word each, and so are 3.5 and 1,000.
- Hyphens split words, so "well-known" counts as two. Word processors don't all agree on this, so expect a small difference on hyphen-heavy text.
- Chinese, Japanese, Thai and other languages written without spaces are split with your browser's built-in word rules (Intl.Segmenter), so you get a real word count instead of one giant word.
- Characters are counted the way you see them: an emoji with a skin tone, a flag or an accented letter is one character. "No spaces" leaves out spaces, tabs and line breaks.
- Sentences use the browser's sentence rules. A full stop inside an abbreviation such as "e.g." can now and then end a sentence early.
- A paragraph is a block of text separated by a blank line. Lines counts every line, including empty ones.
Averages that help you edit
Average word length is the number of letters and digits per word. Plain English usually sits between 4 and 5. Legal and academic writing tends to run higher.
Average sentence length is words divided by sentences. If yours is above 25, try splitting a few sentences in two. Short sentences are easier to read on a phone, and readability checkers will thank you for it.
Getting under a word limit
- Swap long phrases for short ones: "in order to" becomes "to", "due to the fact that" becomes "because", "at this point in time" becomes "now".
- Check the keyword table for a word you repeat. Cutting three of nine "very"s is an easy win.
- Look for sentences that say the same thing twice, often the first and last lines of a paragraph.
- Running short instead? An example or a short quote usually reads better than padding.
About the keyword list
Words are counted without regard to capitals, so "Bread" and "bread" are the same entry. Numbers on their own are skipped. With "Hide common words" on (the default), about 170 English filler words such as the, and, of, it's and you're are left out, so the list shows what your text is actually about. For phrase-level density on a web page, the Keyword Density Checker goes further.
Related tools
What Our Users Say
Real feedback from people using WeblixTools, checked by our team before it appears.
5.0 out of 5 · 1 review
very nice
Frequently Asked Questions
Is my text saved or sent anywhere?
No. All the counting happens in your browser. Close the tab and the text is gone; we never see it.
Why is my count different from Microsoft Word or Google Docs?
Each program has its own rules for hyphens, dashes, numbers and web addresses. Here "well-known" is two words and "example.com" is one. The difference is usually a handful of words on a long document.
How is reading time calculated?
Word count divided by 238, the average silent reading speed for adults reading non-fiction. Speaking time divides by 150. Both are rounded to the nearest second, so treat them as estimates rather than a stopwatch.
Do emoji count as characters?
Yes, and each one counts once, even emoji built from several pieces like 👍🏽 or a family emoji. They don't count as words.
Can I count words in Chinese or Japanese?
Yes, in current browsers. The tool uses your browser's word segmentation for scripts written without spaces. Very old browsers without it fall back to counting runs of characters, which is far less precise for those languages.
What counts as a sentence?
Text that ends with a full stop, question mark or exclamation mark, or reaches the end of the text. Lines that hold only emoji or punctuation aren't counted as sentences.
Is there a size limit?
There's no limit set by us. A few megabytes of plain text works fine on a laptop; on an older phone very long texts take a second or two to update.
Can I count a Word document or a PDF?
Open it, select all, copy and paste it into the box. The Open file button reads plain text files such as .txt, .md and .html, but not .docx or .pdf. Headers, footers and footnotes are only counted if you copy them too.