Word Counter - Count Words, Characters & Sentences Online

A word counter answers a deceptively simple question — how long is this text? — that matters in dozens of everyday situations. Students must hit essay and thesis limits, applicants face strict caps on personal statements, journalists and copywriters work to briefs measured in words, and social platforms, ad networks, and app stores enforce hard character limits. This tool reports all the numbers you need at once: words, characters with and without spaces, sentences, paragraphs, and an estimated reading time, recalculated live on every keystroke. Counting is Unicode-aware rather than a naive split on spaces. A word is a run of letters or digits in any script, so accented names, hyphenated compounds, and contractions are counted sensibly. Chinese, Japanese, and Korean deserve special care because Chinese and Japanese are written without spaces between words: for these scripts the counter treats each Han character as one word, the same convention used by translation agencies and most publishing workflows for zh and ja text. Mixed passages work too — an English sentence quoting a Chinese phrase counts the English words and the Han characters and adds them together. The two character counts serve different masters. Characters with spaces is what most platform limits mean — a microblog post, a meta description, an SMS. Characters without spaces is common in academic submission systems and in the translation industry, where fees are sometimes quoted per character excluding whitespace. Both counts are code-point based, so emoji and other symbols outside the basic plane are counted as one character each rather than two. Sentences are detected at terminal punctuation — periods, question marks, and exclamation points, including their full-width CJK equivalents — and a paragraph is any block of text separated by a blank line, matching how editors and CMSs treat paragraphs. Reading time divides the word total by 225 words per minute, a widely cited average for adult silent reading, and rounds up to the next minute; skimmers will be faster and technical material slower, so treat it as a planning estimate for blog posts, talks, and newsletters. Everything runs locally in your browser. The text you paste — a confidential report, an unpublished manuscript, a private letter — is never uploaded, logged, or stored; close the tab and it is gone. Note that abbreviations such as e.g. or U.S. can register extra sentence boundaries, a limitation shared by every lightweight counter, so the sentence figure is best read as a close approximation.