Word Counter

The Word Counter is a free online tool that provides detailed text statistics including word count, character count (with and without spaces), sentence count, paragraph count, and estimated reading time. It is an essential tool for writers, students, bloggers, and anyone who needs to track text length.

Whether you are writing an essay with a specific word limit, crafting a tweet within character constraints, or preparing content that needs to fit a particular reading time, this tool gives you instant and accurate statistics. It updates in real-time as you type, so you always know exactly where you stand.

The tool processes everything locally in your browser, ensuring your writing remains private. It handles text in any language and works with content of any length, from a single sentence to an entire manuscript. No sign-up or installation required.

The same rule, a word is anything between spaces, makes it a personal statement word counter, a Spanish word counter or a Bible word counter without any settings. Paste Genesis 1:1 from the King James Version, "In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.", and it reports 10 words and 54 characters. Copy the verse with its number in front and the total becomes 11 words, because the number sits between spaces too. A word counter for Chinese characters is the exception: there, read Characters, since Chinese puts no spaces between words.

What counts as a word is a convention rather than a fact, and the convention here is a run of characters between whitespace. That matches how word processors count and how most editors and publishers specify a limit, so the number lines up with an assignment brief or a submission guideline. It also means it does not translate to every language: Chinese, Japanese and Thai are written without spaces between words, so a passage in those scripts counts as very few words and a great many characters. Use the character count there instead. Reading time assumes around 200 to 250 words a minute, which is a reasonable average for adults reading non-technical prose, and is optimistic for dense technical material that people re-read. Hyphenated compounds count as one word.

Converting characters to words gives an estimate rather than an exact figure. An English word averages a little under five letters (4.79 in Peter Norvig's count of the Google Books corpus), and each word also brings a space and the odd comma, so ordinary prose runs at about six characters per word with spaces and five without. That puts 300 characters at roughly 50 words, 1,000 characters at about 170 words, and 3,000 characters at about 500 words when the limit counts spaces. Technical writing with long terms fits fewer words into the same space, and the Avg. word length figure under the counter shows the ratio for your own text. If you came here for a letter counter, read the No Spaces total. It counts every visible character, digits and punctuation included, and the Character Counter checks that same text against platform length limits.