Word Counter
Count words, characters and lines instantly in your browser for writing, editing, content planning and text checks.
Word Counter online
Paste or type your text and instantly see counts of words, characters, lines, sentences and paragraphs, plus an estimated reading time — for essays, articles, applications and anywhere a length limit matters.
How it works
Counting runs on every keystroke. A word is any run of non-whitespace characters, so well-known counts as one word and numbers count as words too. Characters are the JavaScript string length, including spaces and punctuation. Lines are counted by line breaks, paragraphs are the non-empty lines, and sentences are counted by their closing punctuation — . ! ? and the Chinese full stops 。！？ are all recognised. The reading-time estimate assumes about 200 words per minute for English; for Chinese text it switches to the character count at roughly 400 characters per minute, and shows whichever estimate is larger.
Worked example
The sentence The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog. counts as 9 words, 44 characters, 1 line, 1 sentence and 1 paragraph, with a reading time of ~1 min (9 ÷ 200 rounds up to a minute). At the same pace, a 1,000-word article reads in about 5 minutes, and a 3,000-character Chinese essay in about 8 minutes (3,000 ÷ 400, rounded up).
How to use this tool
- Paste or type your text into the box — there is nothing to submit.
- Read the live counts: words, characters, lines, sentences, paragraphs and reading time.
- Edit the text in place and watch the counts update until you reach your target length.
Common uses
Writers use it to fit essays and articles to a target length, students use it to check assignment word limits, and editors use the reading-time estimate before publishing. The character count is handy for meta descriptions, abstracts and platform limits, and the line and paragraph counts help when formatting lists, lyrics or code comments.
Privacy and browser processing
Your text is counted locally in your browser and never leaves your device — safe for unpublished drafts and confidential documents.
Frequently asked questions
How are hyphenated words and numbers counted?
Anything separated by whitespace counts as one word: well-known is one word, state-of-the-art is one word, and 3.14 is one word. If your style guide counts hyphenated compounds as two words, adjust your target accordingly.
How does it count Chinese or Japanese text?
Scripts written without spaces form long non-whitespace runs, so the word count is not meaningful for them — use the character count instead. The tool counts CJK characters separately and bases the reading-time estimate on them at about 400 characters per minute. Sentence counting does recognise 。！？ as sentence endings.
Why does the character count differ from my editor's?
Tools count differently: some exclude spaces, some treat a line break as one or two characters, and emoji are stored as two UTF-16 code units in JavaScript, so each emoji adds 2 to this count. When a platform enforces a limit, check which convention it uses.
Is there a maximum text length?
There is no fixed limit, but extremely large texts (millions of characters) can make the page respond slowly, because every count is recalculated on each keystroke. For book-length files, count chapter by chapter.