Count the words in your text
Paste or type below. Everything updates as you go, and nothing leaves your browser.
Word counter
Counts update as you type. Nothing is uploaded.
- Characters
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- No spaces
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- Sentences
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- Paragraphs
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- Reading time
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- Speaking time
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Word limits worth knowing
Most of the time you are not counting words for their own sake — you are checking against somebody else's limit. The common ones:
- Meta description — around 155 characters before Google truncates it.
- Page title — around 60 characters for the same reason.
- UCAS personal statement — 4,000 characters or 47 lines, whichever comes first.
- Common App essay — 650 words, hard limit.
- Abstract for most journals — 150 to 300 words.
- Conference talk — roughly 140 words per minute spoken, so a 20 minute slot is about 2,800 words.
The character counts above are the reason this page shows characters both with and without spaces. Character limits almost always include spaces; people almost always forget that.
Common questions
How is a word counted?
A word is any run of letters or digits that the browser's own text segmenter recognises as word-like — the same rule it uses when you double-click to select a word. Standalone punctuation, em dashes, and stray symbols are not counted, which is why pasting text with heavy punctuation gives a lower number here than a naive split on spaces would.
Why does my word processor give a slightly different number?
Word processors disagree with each other on the same text. The usual culprits are hyphenated compounds, numbers with units, and URLs — some count 'state-of-the-art' as one word, others as four. Differences of a percent or two on a long document are normal and not a sign either tool is wrong.
How is reading time worked out?
Reading time assumes 238 words per minute, the average silent reading speed for adult prose in published research. Speaking time assumes 140 words per minute, a comfortable pace for reading aloud to an audience. Both round up to the nearest minute.
Is the sentence count exact?
It is an estimate. Sentences are detected by looking for full stops, question marks, and exclamation marks, which means abbreviations like 'Dr.' or 'e.g.' inflate the count. Fixing that properly needs a dictionary of abbreviations, so the number is best treated as approximate.
Is my text uploaded anywhere?
No. Counting happens entirely in your browser as you type. Nothing is sent to a server, logged, or stored, and the page keeps working if you go offline.