Word Counter

What the counter treats as one word

The rule is deliberately simple: leading and trailing whitespace is ignored, then the text is cut at every run of spaces, tabs or line breaks, and each piece is a word. Nothing is checked for letters, so a number, a URL or a lone dash between spaces each count as a word, while a hyphenated compound counts as one.

Characters, sentences and paragraphs defined

• Characters: the length of everything in the box, including spaces, tabs and line breaks. An accented letter typed as one key counts once. Most emoji count as 2, because the count works in UTF-16 code units; a flag or a skin-toned emoji can count as 4 or more.
• Sentences: one is counted at each run of full stops, question marks or exclamation marks that is followed by whitespace or the end of the text. 'Wait... what?! Really?' is 3 sentences. Text with no closing punctuation still counts as 1 sentence.
• Paragraphs: every line break starts a new paragraph, and blank lines are skipped. Text written with single line breaks between paragraphs is counted the same as text with blank lines between them.
• Reading time: words divided by 200 per minute, rounded to the nearest whole minute, never below 1 minute once there is any text.

A worked example

Paste these four lines: 'Hello world. This is a test!' on the first line, 'Second line here.' on the second, a blank third line, and 'Third paragraph.' on the fourth. The tool reports 11 words, 64 characters (the three line breaks are included), 4 sentences and 3 paragraphs, with a reading time of 1 min.

The 64 characters break down as 28 on the first line, 17 on the second, 16 on the fourth, plus three line-break characters. If you typed the same text with a blank line after the first line as well, the character count would rise to 65 while the words, sentences and paragraphs stayed the same.

How reading time rounds

Because the result is a whole number of minutes, two texts that differ by 200 words can show the same time, and the figure only becomes a useful comparison once pieces are several hundred words long. Halves round up, so 300 words shows 2 min rather than 1.

Why your word processor may disagree

Each program splits words by its own rules. Some ignore stand-alone punctuation such as a spaced dash, some split hyphenated compounds into their parts, and some skip numbers. This counter treats anything between whitespace as a word, which usually lands within one or two percent of other tools on ordinary prose but can differ more on text full of symbols, code or tables.

If a submission system enforces a limit, its own counter is the one that matters. Leave a small margin rather than landing exactly on the limit.

Common length targets