Word counter
What the word counter does
This word counter takes whatever you paste or type and returns a live breakdown: words, characters with and without spaces, sentences, paragraphs and an estimated reading time, updating as you write so you can fix a limit while you still can.
It's a local tool: the count runs in your browser, not on a server. Nothing you paste is uploaded or logged, and there's no cap on length or how many times you return.
That's worth saying plainly, since plenty of counters online quietly ship a copy of what you type to a backend before showing a number. This one has no backend to go to: the count is computed on your device, so it works offline the same as with a full signal.
Workflow
How to count words in three steps
No settings, no export step, no waiting for a result. The count is already there when you finish typing, with nothing to configure beforehand and nothing to undo after, since counting never touches the text.
- Step 1
- Drop your text into the counter, pasted or typed.
- Step 2
- Read the live counts above the box: six numbers, updating as you go.
- Step 3
- Edit against whichever number your limit actually enforces.
The breakdown
What the word counter counts: words, characters, sentences and more
A single word count answers one question. This app answers six at once, because the limit you're up against is rarely the one you assumed.
All six come from one pass over the same text, so they stay in step: delete a sentence and every count drops together, instead of drifting apart.
Line breaks count as whitespace for word and character counts but mark where one paragraph ends and the next begins, so a list with blank lines between items can move the paragraph count more than expected.
- Words
- Sequences of letters and digits, split at whitespace and punctuation.
- Characters with spaces
- The full character total: the figure most character-limited fields enforce.
- Characters without spaces
- Whitespace excluded, closer to what a fixed-width field or a database column cares about.
- Sentences
- Split at sentence-ending punctuation: periods, question marks, exclamation marks.
- Paragraphs
- Counted as blocks of text separated by a blank line.
- Reading time
- A minutes estimate from the word count, based on an average silent reading pace.
The mismatch
Why your word count doesn't match Word's
Paste one paragraph into Word, Docs and this app, and you can land on three different totals, not because two are wrong, but because each has its own rule for where a word ends.
Hyphenated words are the usual culprit: 'well-known' counts as one word to a counter treating the hyphen as a letter, two to one treating it as a space. Numbers split the same way at commas and dashes.
URLs and em dashes push totals further apart. A bare link with no internal spaces reads as one long word here, though a word processor may reformat it first. An em dash with no spaces joins the words for one counter, but stays two for another.
Smart quotes and contractions add a smaller gap: a curly apostrophe from a web page isn't the same character as a straight one typed on a keyboard, so a counter checking for one specific apostrophe can split "don't" into two words if the text carries the other kind.
None of this makes a tool broken; the number was never universal. When a limit is strict, count with the tool it was set against, or build in a small margin.
Common targets
Word count targets teams write to
These are the limits that send people looking for a counter in the first place.
- Blog posts and briefs
- A target word count set by an editor or brief, checked against as a draft is written, not after.
- Meta descriptions
- A character limit, roughly 155–160 characters, that search engines truncate past.
- Social captions
- A hard character cap per platform, where the with-spaces count is the one that matters.
- Application essays
- UCAS-style personal statements and similar forms enforcing a firm word or character ceiling.
- Abstracts and summaries
- A strict word ceiling set by a journal, conference or template, usually a few hundred words.
- Bios and profiles
- Author bios, LinkedIn summaries and directory listings often cap at a few hundred characters.
- Subject lines and headlines
- Short character caps where every character over the limit gets cut off in an inbox or search result.
Who it's for
Who uses a word counter, and when
Content teams use it to hold drafts to a brief before reaching an editor. SEO writers use it constantly for title tags and meta descriptions, where the limit is a character count, not a word count, and one character over truncates the result in search.
Students use it against essay and personal-statement limits while drafting, rather than discovering the overage inside a submission portal. Job seekers keep a bio or cover letter inside a form's character cap. Translators compare source and target text, since languages expand or shrink by a predictable margin.
Anyone filling a field that silently truncates checks the number here first. Presenters use the reading-time estimate to time a script before finding out on stage it runs long.
Character counter
Character counter: with spaces or without spaces
Most character-limited fields mean characters with spaces, the figure a browser or form validator checks. This app shows both counts side by side, so there's no guessing which applies.
The gap widens with longer text, the usual reason a word count looks fine while a character count still trips a limit. Read whichever count matches what your field enforces.
It's also a fast way to sanity-check a truncation: if a platform cuts your text off at a stated limit and the result looks shorter than expected, your with-spaces count against that limit usually explains where the cut happened.