Word counter
Type or paste, and every number updates as you go. Your text never leaves this browser.
Your text stays in your browser.
Structure and length of what you wrote.
Your text at a glance
Reading and speaking times are estimates.
Most of the time you want a word count for a reason: a teacher set a range, an editor set a ceiling, or you want to know whether a section has drifted longer than the rest of the piece. This page gives you the count, and the structure behind it — sentence length, paragraph length, and which words you are leaning on.
It works offline once loaded, it needs no account, and it does not have an opinion about your writing.
How this tool counts
A word is a run of characters with no spaces in it that contains at least one letter or digit. That is the whole rule, and it is what makes the counting predictable.
Because of that rule, "don't" is one word, "well-known" is one word, "3.14" is one word, and "https://example.com/page" is one word. A line of dashes is zero words, and so is a lone emoji, because neither contains a letter or a digit.
Word processors differ on the hyphen case in particular — some count "well-known" as two. If you are checking against a specific submission system, count once here and once there before you trust either near a hard limit.
A worked example
Take this two-sentence paragraph: "The deadline is 12 March. I have written 1,240 words so far — about half of what the brief asks for."
- Words
- 20
- Characters (with spaces)
- 100
- Sentences
- 2
- Words per sentence
- 10.0
"12", "1,240" and the em dash behave the way you would expect: the numbers count as words, the standalone dash does not.
Frequently asked questions
Is my text uploaded anywhere?
No. The analysis runs in JavaScript in your browser. There is no request that carries your text, and no server that could store it. You can confirm this by opening your browser's network panel and typing.
Do hyphenated words count as one word or two?
One. "Mother-in-law" is a single word here because it is a single run of characters with no space in it. Some word processors split on the hyphen, so expect a small difference if you compare.
How are contractions counted?
As one word. "Don't", "it's" and "y'all" each count once, whether you use a straight apostrophe or a typographic one.
What counts as a sentence?
A full stop, question mark or exclamation mark followed by a space or the end of the text. A decimal point inside a number and a dot inside a domain name are not followed by a space, so they do not end a sentence.
Is there a size limit?
Not a hard one. Very large documents (over a million characters) switch the word-frequency table to sampling the first million so the page stays responsive; the word, character and sentence counts are always computed on the whole text.