Word Counter Plus
Count words and characters.
0Words
0Characters
0Characters (no spaces)
0Sentences
0Paragraphs
0Unique words
0sReading time
0sSpeaking time
Count words and characters.
Most people open a counter with a target already in mind: a 650-word application essay, a 280-character post, a 1,500-word assignment, a five-minute talk. Counting is the easy half. The useful half is knowing what the number means, and that is the job of the eight live stats above. They refresh a fraction of a second after you stop typing, so a draft settles into its limit while you edit instead of after you paste it somewhere else.
Everything below explains exactly how each figure is produced, because a count you cannot explain is a count you cannot trust. If your teacher, editor, or submission form disagrees with a number here, the rules that follow will usually tell you why.
A word is any run of characters bounded by whitespace. Hyphenated compounds such as well-known count as one word. Contractions such as don't count as one. Numerals such as 2026 count as one, and so does a standalone symbol that has spaces around it. This matches the convention used by Microsoft Word, Google Docs, and nearly every instructor, which is why totals normally agree to within a word or two. The places they disagree are predictable: an em dash typed without spaces glues two words into one, and a number written as 1,500 counts once while 1 500 counts twice.
The first character figure counts everything you typed: letters, digits, punctuation, spaces, and line breaks. That is the number platform limits measure, so it is the one to watch when you are trimming a post or a meta description. The second figure strips every space, tab, and newline and counts the rest, which is what translation quotes and some design and typography briefs ask for. Most emoji register as two characters rather than one, which is also how several social platforms bill them.
Sentences are found by looking for terminal punctuation: a period, question mark, exclamation point, or ellipsis followed by a space or the end of the text. Two categories of false ending are filtered out first. Decimals are protected, so 3.5 million stays one sentence. So are common abbreviations and titles, including Mr., Mrs., Ms., Dr., Prof., St., Jr., Inc., Ltd., vs., e.g., i.e., a.m., p.m., U.S., U.K., and Ph.D. Unusual punctuation can still nudge the estimate, so treat sentence count as a very good approximation rather than a legal measurement.
A paragraph break is a blank line. Text separated by one or more empty lines counts as separate paragraphs, and a block with single line breaks inside it counts as one. If you paste from a word processor that uses single returns between paragraphs, expect a lower paragraph count than you see on screen; add a blank line between blocks and the number will match.
Unique words tells you how many different words you used. Case and surrounding punctuation are ignored, so Writing, writing, and writing, all collapse into one entry. Comparing unique words to total words is a fast vocabulary check: a 500-word passage with 120 unique words is repeating itself far more than one with 280.
Reading time divides your word count by 225 words per minute, the figure this site uses for average adult silent reading of general prose. Research on reading rates clusters a little above that, in the mid-200s, so 225 is a deliberately conservative round number: your readers are unlikely to need longer than the estimate shown. Dense technical material, tables, and equations all read slower than prose, so treat the estimate as a floor for anything specialized. The full picture is in the reading and speaking speed guide.
Speaking time divides your word count by 130 words per minute, a comfortable presentation pace. Conversation runs faster, often near 150, and a deliberately slow, formal delivery sits closer to 110. Because presenters pause, breathe, and answer questions, the honest way to use this number is to write a little under your slot rather than exactly to it. The speech length guide converts every common slot into a word budget.
The keyword panel appears once you have written enough for it to mean anything. It lists your five most-used words with a count and a share of the total, skipping around a hundred common function words such as the, and, of, and it so that real subject words rise to the top. It is a repetition check first and an SEO check second: if one word is running at several percent of your text, readers will feel it.
Highlight any part of your text and the line above the stats reports the word and character count of just that selection. It is the quickest way to check a single paragraph against a limit, measure a quotation, or find out whether the opening you like is really as short as it feels.
All of the counting runs in JavaScript on the page you are looking at. There is no upload step, no submit button, and no request that carries your text anywhere. The script contains no network calls at all, and it writes nothing to browser storage, so nothing persists between visits either: reload the page and the box is empty again. That means unpublished drafts, client work, legal text, and personal writing can all be counted here without leaving your device. The details are in the privacy policy.