Word counter: count words and characters, free and private
A word counter tells you how many words, characters, sentences and paragraphs a text contains. To count words free and privately, paste or type your text into Enter or paste your text. The Words, Characters, Sentences and Paragraphs cards update as you type, with more detail underneath. The counting runs in your browser and nothing is uploaded; you can check that in the Network tab of DevTools.
Below the cards you get characters with and without spaces, unique words, average word length, reading time, speaking time and a table of your most frequent words. It works in any language, because words are found with the Unicode rules built into your browser. Reading time is words ÷ 238 and speaking time is words ÷ 183, in minutes.
If you only need characters, the character counter goes into more detail, and the line counter counts lines.
Table of Use: sample text and what the counter reports
| You paste | Words | Characters (with spaces) | Sentences | Worth knowing |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog. | 9 | 44 | 1 | 8 unique words, because "the" appears twice |
| Hello world. This is a test! Is it working? Yes. | 10 | 48 | 4 | Each . ! and ? ends a sentence |
| Dr. Smith met Mr. Jones on Jan. 3. | 8 | 34 | 1 | The dots after Dr., Mr. and Jan. do not end a sentence |
| A well-known rock'n'roll song, isn't it? | 6 | 40 | 1 | Hyphenated and contracted forms count once |
| naïve café résumé | 3 | 17 | 1 | Accented letters are ordinary letters |
| Привет мир, как дела | 4 | 20 | 1 | Any alphabet is counted |
| Hello 👋 café | 2 | 12 | 1 | The emoji is one character and not a word |
| 日本語のテキスト | 3 | 8 | 1 | Split into 日本語, の and テキスト |
Planning a script or a talk? The tool turns the word count into time. These are its own results:
| Words | Reading Time (238 wpm) | Speaking Time (183 wpm) |
|---|---|---|
| 250 | 1m 3s | 1m 22s |
| 500 | 2m 6s | 2m 44s |
| 1,000 | 4m 12s | 5m 28s |
| 2,000 | 8m 24s | 10m 56s |
| 5,000 | 21m 1s | 27m 19s |
To hear how a script actually sounds, play it in the text to speech preview. If a list repeats lines, strip them with the duplicate line remover before you count.
Features
- Counts as you type. There is no Count button. Words, Characters, Sentences and Paragraphs sit in four cards above the options.
- Detailed Statistics. Characters (with spaces), Characters (without spaces), Unique Words, Average Word Length, Reading Time (238 wpm) and Speaking Time (183 wpm).
- Most Frequent Words. A table with Rank, Word, Count and Share of words. Choose Top 5, 10, 15, 20 or 50.
- Hide from Most Frequent Words. List filler words such as the, and, of. They disappear from the table but still count towards the totals.
- Case sensitive word counting. Off by default, so Apple and apple are one word. Tick it and they become two in the unique-word count and the table; the word total does not change.
- Any language. Hyphenated words and contractions count once, Chinese, Japanese and Thai are split with the browser's dictionary, and an emoji is one character.
- Sentence detection that knows abbreviations. Titles, initials and decimals do not end a sentence, and Chinese, Arabic and Hindi end marks do.
- Copy Statistics, Download Report and Clear. The report is a text file named word-counter-report.txt with the statistics and your original text.
It counts, it does not edit. To change capitalisation before you count, use the text case converter, and to fix a term everywhere use find and replace.
How to count words, step by step
- Type or paste your text into Enter or paste your text.
- Read the Words, Characters, Sentences and Paragraphs cards, then scroll to Detailed Statistics for the rest.
- Under Options, type common words into Hide from Most Frequent Words, pick a number in Top words to show, or tick Case sensitive word counting.
- Check the Most Frequent Words table for repeated terms.
- Click Copy Statistics to put the report on your clipboard, or Download Report to save it as word-counter-report.txt.
- Click Clear to empty the text and the hidden-word list.
Who can use it
- Students and writers keeping an essay or article within a limit. Other programs count some edge cases differently, such as words joined by slashes, so leave a small margin when a hard limit applies.
- SEO writers and editors checking which words dominate a page, then comparing two drafts in the text diff tool.
- Speakers, podcasters and video scriptwriters who need a spoken length from the speaking-time figure.
- Translators and editors counting text in any language before they quote or check a job.
- Designers and developers who need placeholder copy of a known length, which the Lorem Ipsum generator can produce by words, sentences or paragraphs.
- Social media and marketing teams drafting copy against a length limit, with the character counter for a per-character breakdown.
FAQs
How does the word counter decide what is a word?
It uses the Unicode word-boundary rules built into your browser (Intl.Segmenter). A word is a run of letters or digits in any script, so "café", "Привет" and "2026" each count as one. Contractions such as "it's" and hyphenated compounds such as "self-driving" also count as one word. Punctuation and emoji on their own are not words.
Does the word counter work for Chinese, Japanese, Hindi and other languages?
Yes. Accented Latin, Cyrillic, Arabic, Devanagari and other alphabets are counted by their letters. Chinese, Japanese and Thai are written without spaces, so the browser's built-in dictionary splits them into words: 日本語のテキスト counts as 3 words in Chrome. A browser without that dictionary counts each Chinese or Japanese character as a word instead.
What is the difference between characters with and without spaces?
Characters (with spaces) counts everything you typed, including spaces, tabs and line breaks. Characters (without spaces) leaves out all whitespace. Characters are counted as you see them, so an emoji or a letter with an accent counts as one. For example, "Hello 👋 café" is 12 characters with spaces and 10 without.
How are reading time and speaking time calculated?
Reading time is the word count divided by 238 words per minute, and speaking time is the word count divided by 183. They are the average adult rates for silent reading of English non-fiction and for reading aloud, from Marc Brysbaert's 2019 meta-analysis in the Journal of Memory and Language. So 1,000 words takes 4 minutes 12 seconds to read and 5 minutes 28 seconds to say.
How are sentences and paragraphs counted?
A sentence ends at a full stop, question mark, exclamation mark or ellipsis, at Chinese, Japanese, Arabic and Hindi end marks, and at a line break. Titles such as Dr. and Mr., initials and decimal numbers do not end one. Every non-empty line is a paragraph, so text hard-wrapped at the end of each line counts each line as a paragraph and a sentence.
What does "Hide from Most Frequent Words" do?
It removes the words you list, separated by commas, from the Most Frequent Words table. Typing "the, and, of" lets your real keywords rise to the top. The hidden words still count towards the word total, the unique-word count and the share percentages, because they are still part of your text.
Is my text uploaded or saved when I count words?
No. The counting runs in your browser, so the text you paste is not uploaded, logged or stored by ZipConvert, and it is gone when you close the page. You can check this in the Network tab of your browser DevTools while you type: no request carries your text. Download Report saves its file straight from your browser.