Word Counter
Count words, characters, sentences, paragraphs, and lines, plus reading and speaking time. Runs in your browser; your text is never uploaded.
Private by construction. The conversion happens in this page's JavaScript. Nothing you paste here leaves your machine, and the tool keeps working with the network unplugged.
Counts update the moment you press the button: words, characters with and without spaces, sentences, paragraphs, and lines, plus estimated reading and speaking time. The word count uses Unicode-aware matching, so accented names, Cyrillic, Greek, and hyphenated words count correctly — tools that split on ASCII spaces routinely miscount anything that is not plain English. Reading time uses 238 words per minute, the average adult silent-reading rate found in a 2019 meta-analysis of 190 studies; speaking time uses a 130 wpm presentation pace. Because everything runs in this tab, it is safe for text you cannot paste into a random website: unpublished manuscripts, legal drafts, confidential reports.
Questions this tool gets asked
How is a word counted?
A word is any run of letters or digits, including apostrophes and internal hyphens, matched with Unicode-aware rules. So “don't” is one word, “well-known” is one word, and words in non-Latin scripts count correctly.
How accurate is the sentence count?
Sentences are counted by terminal punctuation (. ! ? …). Abbreviations like “e.g.” can inflate the count slightly, which is true of every counter that does not do full linguistic parsing. Treat it as a close estimate.
Where do the reading and speaking speeds come from?
Reading time assumes 238 words per minute, the average adult silent-reading rate reported in Marc Brysbaert's 2019 meta-analysis. Speaking time assumes 130 wpm, a comfortable presentation pace. Slide your own rate up or down for dense technical text.
Does a word or character limit exist?
No hard limit. The counter handles book-length manuscripts; very large texts simply take a moment longer, all still inside your browser.