Word & Character Counter
Processed Client SideCount words, characters, sentences, paragraphs, and estimate reading time — all in real time.
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About Word & Character Counter
This tool runs entirely in your browser. Whatever you paste is processed on your own device and is never uploaded, logged, or sent to any server.
Paste or type text and get a full readout of its size and shape: words, characters with and without spaces, sentences, paragraphs, and lines, plus an estimated reading time. It also reports vocabulary statistics — how many unique words appear, the average word length, and the longest word — which is useful when you are checking whether writing is denser than it needs to be. Everything recalculates as you type, so it works as a live editor for anything with a limit: a meta description, a tweet, an abstract, a bio field, an SEO title. The word count and the vocabulary statistics are measured differently on purpose: words are whatever whitespace separates, while unique words, average length, and longest word are taken from letter-only tokens, which keeps numbers and punctuation from distorting the readability figures.
Key features
- Live counts for words, characters, characters without spaces, sentences, paragraphs, and lines
- Estimated reading time based on 200 words per minute, the standard figure for adult silent reading
- Unique word count, average word length, and longest word for a quick readability read
- Updates as you type, so you can edit down to a limit without repeatedly re-checking
- Counts characters the way form fields do, which is what matters for meta descriptions and social posts
- Handles multi-paragraph documents, pasted articles, and code comments alike
- Vocabulary statistics computed from letter-only tokens, so figures, dates, and IDs do not skew the average word length
- Paragraphs counted by blank-line separation rather than by single newlines, matching how Markdown and most writing tools define one
- No sign-up, no size limit, and nothing uploaded — safe for unpublished drafts and confidential documents
How to use it
- Paste or type your text into the input pane.
- Read the primary counts — words, characters, sentences, paragraphs, lines — as they update live.
- Check the reading time estimate if you are writing to a time budget.
- Use unique words, average word length, and longest word to judge density.
- Edit directly in the pane and watch the numbers change until you are inside your limit.
Tips & common mistakes
- Useful targets: an SEO title is safe under about 60 characters, a meta description under about 160, and both are measured with spaces included.
- Characters without spaces is the count translation and typesetting work is usually quoted against — the two numbers can differ by 15% or more on normal prose.
- Reading time assumes 200 words per minute. Technical writing with code samples realistically reads at half that, so treat the estimate as a floor.
- A low unique-word count relative to total words usually means repetition. It is a fast check for text that keeps restating the same phrase.
- Sentence detection keys off terminal punctuation, so abbreviations like "e.g." and decimal numbers can inflate the sentence count slightly.
- Nothing you paste leaves the browser, which makes this safe for unpublished manuscripts, internal reports, and anything under embargo.
- The word count splits on whitespace, so a hyphenated compound counts as one word and an em dash with spaces around it counts as none. Publishers differ on both, which is worth knowing before you argue with an editor about a limit.
- Numbers and code identifiers are counted as words but are left out of the vocabulary statistics. On a document that is mostly data, the average word length figure describes the prose around it rather than the whole text.
- Need to change the casing of the same text rather than count it? Use the Case Converter.
- Need placeholder text to test with in the first place? Generate some with the Lorem Ipsum Generator.