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Word & Character Counter
Paste or type your text and see the counts update as you go — words, characters with and without spaces, sentences, paragraphs, lines, and an estimated reading time.
How to use it
- Type or paste your text into the box.
- The counts below it update on every keystroke — there is nothing to press.
- Use Copy text to place the text on your clipboard, or Clear to start again.
Why it stays private
The counting happens in your browser as you type. Draft essays, unpublished articles, contracts and private notes are among the most sensitive things people paste into counters, so none of it should ever be transmitted.
Questions
How is reading time calculated?
At 200 words per minute, which is a common average for adult reading of straightforward prose. Technical material is usually slower.
How do you decide where a sentence ends?
By punctuation — a run of text ending in a full stop, question mark, exclamation mark or ellipsis counts as one sentence. This is a good approximation, not a linguistic analysis.
Are the counts exact for CJK text?
Word counting uses whitespace, which is right for Western languages. Chinese, Japanese and Korean text does not separate words with spaces, so for those the character count is the meaningful number, not the word count.