Paste or type text below to see live counts for words, characters, sentences, and paragraphs, plus an estimated reading time.
Runs entirely in your browser — nothing you type here is sent to our server.
Word and character limits show up constantly in everyday writing: a tweet or social post capped at a fixed character count, a college essay with a strict word range, a meta description that search engines truncate past a certain length, or a form field on a job application that rejects anything over a set number of characters. Knowing your exact count before you submit or publish saves the frustration of hitting a limit at the last moment.
Reading-time estimates serve a related but different purpose: they help a writer judge pacing. A blog post that claims “quick read” but actually takes twelve minutes may need trimming, while a keynote speech rehearsed against its speaking-time estimate is less likely to run over its slot. Both estimates in this tool use commonly cited average speeds, so they're a useful guide rather than a guarantee for any specific reader or speaker.
Written from what each site tells us about itself and how the directory works — see something off? Let us know.
The text is split on runs of whitespace, and each resulting chunk is counted as one word. This matches how most word processors count, though it means a hyphenated term like “well-known” counts as one word while an em-dash—separated phrase like this one counts as two, since a space still separates them.
It divides the word count by 200, a commonly cited average adult silent-reading speed in words per minute, and rounds up to the nearest minute. Actual reading speed varies a lot by reader and content, so treat it as a rough guide rather than an exact figure.
It counts groups of characters ending in a period, question mark, or exclamation mark followed by whitespace or the end of the text. Like most automated sentence counters, it can be thrown off by abbreviations (“Dr.”, “e.g.”) or decimal numbers, so treat the count as an estimate for long or technical text.
Any block of text separated from the next by at least one fully blank line. If your text has no blank lines at all, it's counted as a single paragraph regardless of length.
No hard limit is enforced, since counting happens instantly in your browser rather than being uploaded anywhere. Extremely long documents (well beyond typical article or essay length) may make the live count feel slightly less instant, but will still work.
No, it only counts. For spelling and grammar, a dedicated proofreading tool or your word processor's built-in checker is a better fit.
