Word Counter
Count words, characters, sentences, and paragraphs in your text with an estimated reading time.
Most frequent words
Your files are processed locally in your browser and are not uploaded to our servers. All counting happens instantly in your browser as you type — your text is never uploaded or sent to any server.
How to use Word Counter
Paste or type your text into the box and instantly see live counts of words, characters (with and without spaces), sentences, and paragraphs, along with an estimated reading time. Word counting splits on whitespace, sentence counting uses simple end-of-sentence punctuation, and paragraph counting looks for blank lines between blocks of text. Everything runs directly in your browser as you type — nothing is ever uploaded or sent anywhere.
Key features
- Live word count as you type
- Character counts with and without spaces
- Sentence and paragraph counts
- Estimated reading time at ~200 words per minute
- Instant updates with a lightweight debounce for smooth typing
- Optional top 5 most frequent words, with common stopwords filtered out
Practical use cases
- Checking if an essay or article meets a required word count
- Staying under a character limit for a social media post or SMS
- Estimating how long a speech or presentation script will take to read aloud
- Checking a cover letter or resume summary's length before submitting
Supported formats
Accepted: counter
Limitations
- Sentence detection is a simple punctuation-based heuristic and can miscount abbreviations like "Mr." or "e.g." as sentence breaks
- Reading time is a rough average estimate at ~200 words per minute, not personalized to any individual's actual reading speed
Frequently asked questions
- How is reading time calculated?
- Reading time is estimated using an average reading speed of about 200 words per minute, a commonly used baseline. Actual reading speed varies a lot by person and by how dense or technical the content is, so treat this as a rough guide rather than an exact figure.
- Does this include spaces in the character count?
- Both are shown separately — "Characters (with spaces)" counts every character including spaces, while "Characters (no spaces)" strips out all whitespace first. Use whichever matches the limit you're working against.
- How accurate is the sentence count?
- Sentence counting uses a simple heuristic based on periods, exclamation points, and question marks, so it isn't a full language parser. Abbreviations like "Mr." or "e.g." can occasionally be miscounted as the end of a sentence, which is a known limitation of punctuation-based counting.
- Does this tool upload my text anywhere?
- No. All counting happens locally in your browser using JavaScript — your text is never sent to a server, stored, or logged anywhere.
Related tools
Part of Text Tools