Word Counter
Count words, characters, sentences, and paragraphs, with estimated reading time.
About the Word Counter
This tool breaks your text down along several axes at once. Words are counted by splitting on whitespace; characters are counted both including and excluding spaces so you can check against either kind of limit (character-based limits like SMS or meta descriptions typically exclude formatting whitespace); sentences are detected from terminal punctuation (. ! ?); and paragraphs are detected from blank lines. Reading time divides the word count by 200 words per minute — a commonly cited average adult silent- reading speed — and rounds up, so a 500-word draft shows about 3 minutes.
To use it: paste or type any text into the box and every stat updates as you go. The top keywords panel counts word frequency after filtering out common stop words ("the," "and," "of," and similar function words that appear constantly regardless of topic), surfacing the words that actually characterize your content — useful for spotting an overused word before publishing, or getting a quick sense of what a piece of text is actually about. It's also a fast way to check a draft against a hard word-count requirement, like a 250-word essay prompt or a character-limited social post.
How is reading time calculated?+−
We divide the word count by 200 words per minute, a commonly used average adult silent-reading speed, and round up.
What counts as a "word" here?+−
A word is any sequence of characters separated by whitespace — so hyphenated terms and contractions each count as one word, while a stray double space between words doesn't create an extra one.
Why is my character count different with and without spaces?+−
"Characters" counts every character including spaces, tabs, and line breaks. "Characters (no spaces)" strips all whitespace first — the gap between the two roughly matches your word count minus one, since there's one space between each pair of words.
How are sentences and paragraphs detected?+−
Sentences are counted by splitting on sentence-ending punctuation (. ! ?), and paragraphs are counted by splitting on blank lines — so a heavily abbreviated or unusually punctuated text can throw off the sentence count slightly.
Why are common words like "the" and "and" excluded from the top keywords list?+−
Those are stop words — extremely frequent function words that carry little topical meaning. Filtering them out surfaces the words that actually characterize your text's subject matter.
Is 200 words per minute realistic for everyone?+−
It's a commonly cited average for adult silent reading of general prose. Technical or dense material is typically read more slowly, and skimming or reading aloud both change the real-world time — treat the estimate as a rough guide, not a precise prediction.