Word & Character Counter

About the Word & Character Counter

This tallies your text in real time as you type or paste, reporting six figures at once: word count, character count with and without spaces, sentences, paragraphs, and estimated reading time. It's the tool for hitting a length target — an essay or assignment with a word limit, a blog post, a meta description capped at a character count, a tweet or bio, a cover letter — and for anyone who needs to know how long a piece is at a glance.

How the counts are calculated

• Words — the text is split on whitespace, so any run of non-space characters (including hyphenated or punctuated tokens) counts as one word.
• Characters — every character including spaces.
• No spaces — the character count with all whitespace removed.
• Sentences — detected by terminal punctuation (., !, ?).
• Paragraphs — blocks separated by a blank line.
• Reading time — word count divided by 200 words per minute, rounded up to the nearest minute.

Assumptions and defaults

• Reading time assumes 200 words per minute, a typical average for adult reading of general text, and always rounds up to at least one minute for any text.
• A word is a whitespace-separated token, so state-of-the-art counts as one word and don't counts as one.
• Sentences are counted by end punctuation, so a sentence must end in ., ! or ? to be counted.
• Paragraphs are separated by blank lines, not by single line breaks.

Limitations

• Sentence detection is punctuation-based, so abbreviations like "e.g." or "Dr." can be miscounted as sentence ends, and a sentence with no closing punctuation isn't counted.
• Reading time is a single fixed rate. Dense or technical text reads slower than 200 wpm and simple text faster, so treat it as a ballpark.
• Word counting is whitespace-based, which matches most word-count conventions but can differ slightly from a specific app's rules (some count hyphenated words as two).
• It counts what's in the box; it doesn't account for images, tables or footnotes in a larger document.

Privacy

Your text is processed entirely in your browser. Nothing is uploaded, stored, or sent anywhere.