Paste or type text into the word counter to count words, characters with and without spaces, sentences, paragraphs and lines as you type. The counter also estimates reading time at 238 words per minute and speaking time at 183, shows the longest word and lists the most frequent keywords without common English filler words. Your text stays in your browser.
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Table of Contents
How to use the word counter
Type or paste into the box. All numbers update as you type. The keyword table lists the 15 most frequent words with their count and share of all words. Untick the option above it to include common words such as the and of. Clear empties the box. Text up to 2 MB is supported.
How things are counted
- Words are runs of letters or digits. Apostrophes and hyphens inside a word keep it whole, so didn’t and well-known count once, and decimals such as 99.9 are one word.
- Characters are what you see: an emoji built from several code points, such as a family emoji, counts as one. Characters without spaces leave out spaces, tabs and new lines.
- Sentences end with . ! ? or an ellipsis followed by a space or the end of the text; a blank line also ends one. Abbreviations such as e.g. may be counted as an extra sentence.
- Paragraphs are blocks separated by a blank line, and lines include blank lines.
Reading and speaking time
Reading time uses 238 words per minute, the average for silent reading of non-fiction found in a 2019 meta-analysis of reading-rate studies by Marc Brysbaert. Speaking time uses 183 words per minute, the average the same review found for reading aloud. Real speed varies with the reader and how technical the text is, so treat both as estimates. A 1,000-word article takes about 4 minutes 12 seconds to read and 5 minutes 28 seconds to read aloud.
Using the keyword list
The keyword list helps you spot repetition and check that a page is about what you think it is about. A word that makes up a large share of all words can read as stuffing; a key term that is missing from the list may need more mentions. Numbers are left out of the list.
For server admins
For files on a server, wc and a short pipeline give similar counts:
wc -w -m -l article.txt
tr -cs '[:alpha:]' '\n' < article.txt | tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]' | sort | uniq -c | sort -rn | headNote that wc -l counts new line characters, so a file without a final new line shows one line fewer than this tool.
At a glance
Related tools: Case Converter · Lorem Ipsum Generator · Markdown Editor with Live Preview · Diff Checker: Compare Two Texts.
Official documentation (checked 9 October 2026): Brysbaert (2019), How many words do we read per minute? A review and meta-analysis of reading rate, Journal of Memory and Language · MDN: Intl.Segmenter
Frequently asked questions
How is reading time calculated?
The word count is divided by 238 words per minute for reading and by 183 for speaking, then rounded to the nearest second.
Do emoji and accented letters count as one character?
Yes. The counter counts visible characters (grapheme clusters), so an accented letter or an emoji made of several code points counts once.
Which words are left out of the keyword list?
About 190 common English words such as articles, pronouns, prepositions and auxiliary verbs, plus numbers. Untick the option to include them.