About this word counter
Paste an essay, draft, or social caption to measure its length before you publish. The counter reports words, Unicode characters, characters without whitespace, sentence segments, and reading time. Use the same text to compare a short edit with your original draft. Nothing leaves this browser, so you can work on a private first draft without creating an account. You can reset the workspace between separate tasks.
How it works
Words are groups of Unicode letters or numbers, with internal apostrophes and hyphens kept together. Reading time rounds up at 200 words per minute. Sentence segments are separated by terminal punctuation.
Try these examples
Hello world!
2 words · 12 characters · 1 sentence
One two three. Four five!
5 words · 2 sentences · 1 minute
Limitations & privacy
Character counts use Unicode code points, not visual grapheme clusters. Emoji sequences may count as multiple characters. Sentence counts are estimates; abbreviations may create extra segments. Maximum input: 100,000 characters.
Inputs and results stay in this browser. Only tool identifiers are stored for your recently used tools. You can clear that history from the directory.
A few good questions
Does a hyphenated word count as one?
Yes. Well-written and contractions count as single words.
How is reading time calculated?
The word count is divided by 200 and rounded up to whole minutes.
Can I count non-English text?
Unicode letters are recognized. Languages without spaces may need a language-specific tokenizer.
Updated September 12, 2026