Word counter · Free · No sign-up
Word Counter
A word counter counts the words in a piece of text as you type or paste it. This one also counts characters with and without spaces, sentences and paragraphs, says exactly what it counts as a word, shows the count under two other rules, and gives reading time at a sourced rate.
The example text: 65 words here, 62 counted by spaces only, 66 with hyphens split.
Nothing typed yet. Your text is kept in this browser only.
- Words
- 0
- Characters
- 0
- No spaces
- 0
- Sentences
- 0
- Paragraphs
- 0
- Unique words
- 0
- Reading time
- 0 sec
- Speaking time
- 0 sec
Type a limit to see how much is left.
The count under other rules
| Rule | Words | Difference |
|---|---|---|
| This counter | 0 | same |
| Spaces only | 0 | same |
| Hyphens split words | 0 | same |
The three counts agree on plain words; they part on hyphens, dashes, slashes, symbols and East Asian text.
Sentences and reading level
| Measure | Your text |
|---|---|
| Average word length | – |
| Average sentence length | – |
| Longest sentence | – |
| Syllables (estimate) | – |
| Flesch Reading Ease | – |
| Flesch–Kincaid grade | – |
The reading level needs at least one English sentence.
Most used words
| Word or phrase | Times | Share |
|---|---|---|
| Nothing to list yet. | ||
The words and phrases you use most, with their share of the text.
Counted in this browser. Your text is kept on this device so it survives a reload, and is never sent anywhere: Clear removes it.
Paste or type your text, or open a .docx or text file. The words, characters, sentences, reading time and Flesch scores update as you type, and nothing leaves your browser.
A word count is the number of words in a text, used to meet limits on essays, applications, articles and posts. Tools differ on what counts as a word, mostly over hyphens, dashes, slashes, symbols and languages written without spaces, so a stated rule matters.
- No sign-up
- Nothing uploaded
- Rule stated
- Works offline
- Opens .docx
Key facts
| Detail | Answer |
|---|---|
| Price | Free, no sign-up, nothing to install |
| A word is | A run of letters or digits; an apostrophe, hyphen or full stop inside joins it |
| Also counted | Characters with and without spaces, sentences, paragraphs, unique words |
| Other rules shown | Spaces only, and hyphens splitting words |
| Reading time | 238 words a minute silent, 183 aloud (Brysbaert 2019), editable |
| Reading level | Flesch Reading Ease and Flesch–Kincaid grade, English only |
| Files | .docx and plain text, read on your device |
| Where text is kept | This browser only |
How to count the words in a text
Put the text in, read the board, and check it against your limit.
Put the text in
Paste or type into the box, or choose Open a file for a .docx or text file.
Read the board
Words are at the top, characters under them, then sentences, paragraphs and reading time.
Set your limit
Type the limit and choose words or characters; the note says how many are left.
Check the other rules
The table shows the count by spaces only and with hyphens split, and names what in your text makes them differ.
Check the reading level
The Flesch scores and sentence lengths are in the next table.
Look for repeats
The last table lists the words and phrases you use most.
Who uses a word counter
Anyone writing to a length, a limit or a time.
Students
Essays and coursework to a word count, and application essays that refuse a word over the limit.
Applicants
Personal statements by characters for UCAS or by words for the Common App, checked against the strictest rule.
Speakers
A talk timed before it is given, at your own reading-aloud rate.
Writers and editors
Articles to a commissioned length, and the words a draft leans on too often.
Marketers
Posts and messages to a character limit, and copy aimed at a plain-English score.
Translators
A source text counted before quoting, Chinese and Japanese included.
How a word is counted here, and where counters disagree
A word counter has to decide what a word is, and most never say. The rule here: a word is a run of letters or digits. An apostrophe, a hyphen or a full stop between two of them joins them, so don’t, well-known, 3.14 and U.S.A. are one word each, and so does a comma or colon between digits, so 1,000 and 10:30 are one. Dashes, slashes and spaces separate. A web address or an email address is one word. A symbol on its own, such as &, is not a word. Chinese and Japanese characters count one word each, because those scripts put no spaces between words; Korean, which does, is counted by its spaces.
| Text | What it tests | This counter | Spaces only | Hyphens split |
|---|---|---|---|---|
well-known | A hyphenated word | 1 | 1 | 2 |
mother-in-law | Two hyphens | 1 | 1 | 3 |
2026-10-29 | A date written with hyphens | 1 | 1 | 3 |
don’t | An apostrophe | 1 | 1 | 1 |
rock—paper | A dash with no spaces | 2 | 1 | 2 |
rock — paper | A dash with spaces | 2 | 3 | 2 |
and/or | A slash | 2 | 1 | 2 |
& | A symbol on its own | 0 | 1 | 0 |
3.14 · 1,000 · 10:30 | Numbers with a point, comma or colon | 3 | 3 | 3 |
U.S.A. | Full stops inside a word | 1 | 1 | 1 |
https://example.com/a-b | A web address | 1 | 1 | 1 |
東京は大きい | Japanese: “Tokyo is big” | 6 | 1 | 6 |
The spaces only rule is what the simplest counters do: count the gaps. It makes rock—paper one word and a free-standing dash a word of its own, and it counts a whole Japanese sentence as one. The hyphens split rule is how some older word processors and scripts counted. Neither is wrong; they are different rules, and the tool shows your text under all three with the places they part named under the table.
Why it matters. On ordinary prose the three rules land within a word or two of each other in a hundred. The example text on the tool is 65 words here, 62 by spaces only and 66 with hyphens split. When a limit is hard, as on an application form that refuses word 651, write to the highest of the three and the box will take it whatever rule it uses. The tool warns when your text is under the limit by this rule but over it by another.
What word processors, Unicode’s word-boundary rules and application portals count, and how to meet a hard limit when the rule is not stated, is in why word counts differ between tools, which counts the same texts by four rules side by side.
Reading and speaking time: 238 and 183 words a minute, and where they come from
Most counters say “reading time” without saying how fast the reader is. This one uses 238 words a minute for silent reading and 183 words a minute for reading aloud, the averages for adults reading English found by Marc Brysbaert’s 2019 review of 190 studies and 18,573 readers (Journal of Memory and Language, “How many words do we read per minute? A review and meta-analysis of reading rate”). The same review puts fiction at 260 words a minute, because its words are shorter. The often-quoted 300 words a minute is faster than the evidence supports.
| Words | Reading (238 wpm) | Fiction (260 wpm) | Aloud (183 wpm) |
|---|---|---|---|
| 100 | 25 sec | 23 sec | 33 sec |
| 300 | 1 min 16 sec | 1 min 9 sec | 1 min 38 sec |
| 500 | 2 min 6 sec | 1 min 55 sec | 2 min 44 sec |
| 650 | 2 min 44 sec | 2 min 30 sec | 3 min 33 sec |
| 1,000 | 4 min 12 sec | 3 min 51 sec | 5 min 28 sec |
| 1,500 | 6 min 18 sec | 5 min 46 sec | 8 min 12 sec |
| 2,000 | 8 min 24 sec | 7 min 42 sec | 10 min 56 sec |
| 2,500 | 10 min 30 sec | 9 min 37 sec | 13 min 40 sec |
| 5,000 | 21 min 1 sec | 19 min 14 sec | 27 min 19 sec |
A speech is slower than reading aloud. 183 words a minute is a script read straight through. A talk with pauses, emphasis and an audience usually runs nearer 130 to 150 words a minute, the pace speaking coaches plan to, so a five-minute speech is about 650 to 750 words rather than 915. Both rate fields on the tool take any figure from 20 to 2,000: time yourself reading a page, divide the words by the minutes, and type your own rate in.
Children, older adults and people reading in a second language read more slowly, the review found, and technical text is slower than a novel for everyone. Treat any reading time, this one included, as an average reader on an average text.
Reading level: the two Flesch formulas, shown
“Reading level” on most counters is a single label from an unnamed formula. This tool gives the two scores the label usually comes from, with the arithmetic:
Flesch Reading Ease = 206.835 − 1.015 × (words ÷ sentences) − 84.6 × (syllables ÷ words). Rudolf Flesch published it in 1948. Higher is easier; most scores fall between 0 and 100.
Flesch–Kincaid grade = 0.39 × (words ÷ sentences) + 11.8 × (syllables ÷ words) − 15.59. J. Peter Kincaid and colleagues derived it for the US Navy in 1975. It reads as a US school grade: 8 means a typical 13 to 14-year-old.
| Score | Description | Roughly |
|---|---|---|
| 90 to 100 | Very easy | Short sentences, short words; a children’s story |
| 80 to 89 | Easy | Conversational writing |
| 70 to 79 | Fairly easy | Popular fiction |
| 60 to 69 | Standard | Plain English for the general public |
| 50 to 59 | Fairly difficult | Quality newspapers |
| 30 to 49 | Difficult | Academic writing |
| Below 30 | Very difficult | Legal and scientific papers |
The example, worked. The tool’s example text has 63 English words in 4 sentences and an estimated 85 syllables: 15.75 words a sentence and 1.35 syllables a word. Reading Ease is 206.835 − 15.99 − 114.14 = 76.7, fairly easy; the grade is 6.14 + 15.92 − 15.59 = 6.5. Numbers and Chinese or Japanese characters are left out of both, because the formulas were built for English words.
Syllables are estimated. The tool counts groups of vowels in each word and drops a silent final e, the usual rule of thumb. It is right for most words and off by one for some, so two tools can give the same text scores a few points apart. Both formulas were built on samples of about 100 words; the tool says so when your text is shorter. And neither formula knows whether a sentence makes sense: a short sentence of short words scores as easy whatever it says.
Word and character limits, and how each is counted
Type the limit and choose words, characters, or characters without spaces; the tool counts down and turns red when you are over. These are the limits people most often check, with how each one is counted where the owner says so:
| Where | Limit | Counted as |
|---|---|---|
| Common App personal essay (US) | 650 words | The box refuses more; its rule for hyphens and dashes is not published, so leave a few words spare |
| University of California personal insight questions | 350 words each | A maximum per answer, set by the University of California |
| UCAS personal statement (UK, from 2026 entry) | 4,000 characters | Across three answers together, spaces and line breaks included; at least 350 characters per answer |
| A post on X | 280 characters | Weighted: Chinese, Japanese and Korean characters count 2 and every link counts 23, so the plain character count here can be under X’s |
| A text message (SMS) | 160 characters | 70 if any character is outside the GSM alphabet, an emoji included; longer messages split into parts of 153 or 67 |
Characters with or without spaces. When a form says “characters” it nearly always means with spaces, as UCAS does. “Without spaces” leaves out spaces, tabs and line breaks. An emoji, or a letter with an accent typed as two code points, is counted here as the one character you see. X, text messages and web forms count those differently, and the character counter gives the count each of them sees.
Opening a Word file without uploading it
Open a file reads a Word document (.docx) or a plain text file (.txt, .md, .csv) in this browser. Nothing is uploaded: a .docx is a zip archive, and the page opens it on your device and reads the document’s main text. What is counted from a .docx:
| Part of the document | Counted |
|---|---|
| Body text, headings, lists and tables | Yes, a paragraph a line |
| Tracked changes | Insertions yes, deletions no: the text as it would read if accepted |
| Text boxes, footnotes, endnotes, headers and footers | No, as in Word’s own count with “Include textboxes, footnotes and endnotes” unticked |
| Comments and field codes | No |
Older .doc files, PDFs, .odt and Pages files are not read: copy the text from them and paste it in. The text you type or open is kept in this browser’s storage so a reload does not lose it, and stays on this device. Clear deletes it, and Bring back the previous text undoes a clear, an example or a file you opened by mistake.
What this word counter does not do
The word counter counts and measures. It does not judge the writing:
| It does | It does not |
|---|---|
| Count words, characters, sentences and paragraphs, and say how | Check grammar or spelling beyond your browser’s own underlining |
| Give reading and speaking time at stated rates | Check for plagiarism, or guess whether a machine wrote the text: no detector does that reliably, and a false accusation does real harm |
| Give two Flesch scores for English text | Score readability in other languages; the formulas were built for English |
| Count Chinese and Japanese characters one word each | Split Thai, Lao, Khmer or Burmese into words: written without spaces, a run of them counts as one word |
| Read .docx and plain text files on your device | Send your text anywhere, or keep it anywhere but this browser |
| Count the words in one text | Compare two drafts or turn words into pages: the edit counter counts the words kept, cut, added and moved between drafts, and the words per page calculator works out pages from the font and spacing |
This counter, a typical online counter, a word processor or by hand
Four ways to count the words in a piece of writing, and where each stops.
| This word counter | A typical online counter | Word or Google Docs | By hand | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Cost | Free, no sign-up | Free, often with upsells | Part of the app | Free |
| Says what a word is | Yes, with examples | Rarely | Not documented | Your call |
| Count under other rules | Spaces only and hyphens split, with the differences named | No | No | Slow |
| Reading time | 238 and 183 wpm, sourced, editable | Unstated rate | No | With a stopwatch |
| Reading level | Both Flesch scores, formulas shown | A label | Word only, in its options | No |
| Limit with a warning | Words or characters, checked against the strictest rule | Sometimes | No | Yes |
| Where your text goes | Nowhere: this browser only | Often a server or an account | The provider’s cloud, for Docs | Nowhere |
More writing tools
Every writing tool on the site runs in your browser, needs no sign-up, and sends nothing anywhere.
Counts & lengths3
Words, characters, pages and what changed in an edit, counted the way you need them.
Character counter
Characters with and without spaces, and as X, text messages, web forms and bytes count them, causes named.
Open character counter →Words per page calculator
Words to pages and back from the font, size, spacing, paper and margins, your own text or a document.
Open words per page calculator →Edit counter
Words kept, cut, added and moved between two drafts, and a Word file's tracked changes, counted in the browser.
Open edit counter →
All 4 writing tools, by category: Counts & lengths (4)
Frequently asked questions
Do hyphenated words count as one word?
Here, yes: a hyphen between two letters or digits joins them, so well-known and mother-in-law are one word each. Most word processors and counters agree, but some count each part. The table under the tool shows your text with hyphens splitting words too, so if a limit is tight you can see the worst case before you submit.
Does don't count as one word or two?
One. An apostrophe between two letters joins them, so don’t, it’s and o’clock are one word each here, whichever apostrophe you type. Every common counting rule treats a contraction as a single word, because there is no space or other separator inside it. Spoken it may be two words, but written it is counted as one.
Do dashes count as words?
No. A dash separates words, and is not one itself. Rock—paper with no spaces is two words here, and so is rock — paper with spaces. A counter that only counts spaces gets one and three for those, which is why the tool shows the spaces-only count beside its own and names every dash it finds between words.
Why does my count differ from Word by a few words?
Because counters disagree on a few cases: dashes typed without spaces, slashes such as and/or, symbols standing alone, web addresses and East Asian text. On ordinary prose the difference is a word or two in a hundred. The tool shows your count under two other rules and names the cases in your text, so you can see where a difference comes from.
Do numbers count as words?
Yes. A number is a run of digits, so 2026 is one word, and a point, comma or colon between digits keeps it whole: 3.14, 1,000 and 10:30 are one word each. A date such as 2026-10-29 is one word here because hyphens join; counted with hyphens splitting it is three. Spelled out, two thousand and twenty-six is four words.
How long does it take to read 1,000 words?
About 4 minutes 12 seconds at 238 words a minute, the average silent reading rate for adults reading English non-fiction found by a 2019 review of 190 studies. Fiction reads faster, at about 260. Reading 1,000 words aloud takes about 5 minutes 28 seconds at 183 words a minute. Type your own rate into the tool to change both.
How many words is a 5-minute speech?
About 650 to 750 words at a speaking pace of 130 to 150 words a minute, which leaves room for pauses. Read straight through at 183 words a minute, the average reading-aloud rate, five minutes holds about 915 words. Paste your script, set the aloud rate to your own pace, and the tool gives the speaking time.
How are Chinese and Japanese words counted?
Each Chinese character, and each hiragana or katakana character, counts as one word, because those scripts put no spaces between words, and translation quotes for them are usually priced by the character for the same reason. A counter that only counts spaces would make a whole sentence one word. Korean uses spaces and is counted by them.
What is a good Flesch reading ease score?
60 to 70 is plain English that most adults read easily, and is a common target for writing aimed at the public. 70 to 80 is fairly easy, like popular fiction; below 50 is difficult, like academic writing. The score comes from sentence length and syllables per word, so shorter sentences and shorter words raise it. It says nothing about whether the text makes sense.
Is my text saved or uploaded?
It is saved in this browser’s storage on your device, so a reload or a closed tab does not lose it, and it is never uploaded: the counting, and reading a .docx file, happen on your device. Clear deletes it. On a shared computer, clear the box when you finish, as you would close a document.
Related guides
Longer answers to the questions behind the numbers.
- Reference
Types of counters explained
Synchronous vs asynchronous, mod-N, ring and Johnson, industrial and PLC counters, plus mechanical and software counters.
- Counting
Why word counts differ between tools
The same sentence is 26 words to one counter and 39 to another. Four counting rules side by side, and how to meet a hard limit whichever one a form uses.
- Build it
How to make a counter
Twenty lines gets you counting. Here is what to add after that, and why.