Counts as you type
No submit button and no waiting. Every metric recalculates on input, which is what you need when you are trimming to a limit rather than measuring afterwards.
Word Counter
Count words, characters, sentences, paragraphs and reading time as you type.
- Input
- No upload needed — instant
- Privacy
- Nothing is uploaded
- Cost
- Free · no sign-up · no watermark
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Processed entirely on your device
Everything you type or paste is handled by JavaScript running in this tab. No request is sent, nothing is logged and nothing is stored. Close the page and it is gone.
Overview
About the Word Counter
A live word counter that tracks words, characters with and without spaces, sentences, paragraphs, reading time and keyword frequency. Paste and see instantly.
Word counting looks trivial until a limit is attached to it. A university essay at 2000 words, a meta description at 155 characters, a grant abstract at 250 words, a tweet at 280 — in each case the count is the constraint that shapes the writing, and discovering you are 400 words over after finishing is a miserable experience.
What each metric is actually measuring
Words are whitespace-separated tokens. This is the number almost every limit refers to.
Characters with spaces is what form fields, SMS and social platforms measure. It is roughly six times the word count for typical English prose.
Characters without spaces appears in some academic and legal submission systems, and in SEO title-length analysis where whitespace is excluded from certain pixel estimates.
Sentences and paragraphs are proxies for readability. An average sentence length above about 25 words, or paragraphs longer than five or six lines, is where readers start to lose the thread.
Reading time uses 238 words per minute for silent reading, the figure from large-scale eye-tracking studies. Speaking time uses 150 wpm, a comfortable presentation pace. Both are adjustable here because audience matters: technical readers go slower, familiar content goes faster.
Using keyword frequency well
The frequency panel is a repetition detector more than an SEO instrument. If a noun appears thirty times in five hundred words, the prose will feel stuck. Academic and legal writing tolerates repetition better than marketing copy, but in either case synonyms and pronouns improve the reading experience.
For genuine SEO density analysis — where you are measuring a target phrase against a competitor's page — the dedicated keyword density checker handles phrases, case sensitivity and stop-word exclusion properly.
Counting for specific platforms
Character counts are the safe proxy for all of these, but for Google's title and description the real limit is pixel width, which is why the SERP preview tools measure truncation visually rather than by character count.
Step by step
How to use the Word Counter
Type or paste your text into the editor — counts update on every keystroke.
Read the headline metrics: words, characters, sentences and paragraphs.
Check reading and speaking time at an adjustable words-per-minute rate.
Scroll to the keyword panel to see your most frequent terms and their density.
Copy the full statistics block, or clear the editor and start again.
Why use it
Benefits and common use cases
What this tool is good for, and what it deliberately does not try to do.
Reading and speaking time
Estimates based on 238 wpm silent reading and 150 wpm speaking — the figures most style guides use — with the rate adjustable to your audience.
Keyword frequency included
The top terms and their density appear alongside the counts, so you can spot accidental repetition without switching to another tool.
Nothing is transmitted
Manuscripts, legal drafts and confidential copy are analysed entirely in the page. There is no request to count, so there is nothing to intercept.
Questions
Frequently asked questions
Short, honest answers about quality, limits and privacy.
How does the counter decide what a word is?
It splits on runs of whitespace and counts each non-empty token as one word. Contractions like don't count as one word, hyphenated compounds like well-known count as one, and an em dash surrounded by spaces counts as a token — matching how Word and Google Docs behave in most cases.
Why does my count differ from Microsoft Word?
Word counts some typographic elements differently: a standalone dash or bullet can count as a word, and fields or hidden text may be included or excluded depending on settings. Differences of one or two on a long document are normal and usually come from punctuation treated as tokens.
How are sentences counted?
By splitting on sentence-ending punctuation (. ! ?) followed by whitespace or end of text. Abbreviations such as e.g. and Dr. can cause a small over-count, which is why the figure is best treated as an estimate rather than an exact measurement.
What is the difference between characters with and without spaces?
Characters with spaces counts every character including spaces and line breaks. Characters without spaces excludes whitespace. Twitter/X limits use the former; many form fields and SEO meta descriptions use something closer to it too.
Is there a maximum text length?
No hard limit. Very large documents — beyond roughly a million characters — may make the live recount feel sluggish on a slow device, since every keystroke re-analyses the whole text.