Word Counter

Paste or type your text below to instantly count words, characters, sentences, and more.

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Words
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Characters
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Sentences
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Paragraphs
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Reading Time
How each metric is calculated
Words
Split trimmed text on whitespace sequences (\s+) → count tokens.
"Hello world" = 2 words

Characters
Total character count including spaces: text.length
"Hello world" = 11 characters

Sentences
Count occurrences of terminal punctuation: . ! ?
If no punctuation but text exists, counts as 1 sentence.
"Hello world. Hi!" = 2 sentences

Paragraphs
Split on blank lines (two or more newlines) and count non-empty blocks.
Text with no blank lines = 1 paragraph.

Reading Time
Reading Time = ⌈Words ÷ 238⌉ minutes
Based on 238 wpm — the research-validated average adult silent reading speed
(Brysbaert, 2019 — meta-analysis of 190 studies, 17,887 participants).

Why Word and Character Counts Matter

Whether you are drafting a social media post, structuring an essential academic essay, or formatting a professional resume, text length is a critical constraint. A reliable word counter ensures you remain within strict limitations without constantly manually reviewing your document's length. Beyond simple word counts, character counts (both with and without spaces) are vital for data entry fields, SMS marketing, and SEO meta tags.

Understanding Text Metrics

Professional writing often requires specific structural metrics to ensure readability. Tracking the number of sentences and paragraphs helps maintain a natural rhythm in your writing. If your sentence-to-paragraph ratio is too high, your text may become a "wall of text" that is difficult for readers to digest. Our live text analyzer breaks down these metrics as you type.

Reading Time Estimation

In the digital age, attention spans are short. Providing an estimated reading time helps set expectations for your audience, increasing the likelihood that they will actually finish reading your content. Research shows the average adult reads approximately 238 words per minute for non-fiction text (Brysbaert, 2019 — a meta-analysis of over 17,000 participants), which is the standard our tool uses to estimate reading time for your content.