How to use the word counter
- Type or paste text into the box. The counts update instantly.
- Watch the words, characters (with and without spaces), sentences, paragraphs and lines.
- Check reading and speaking time, plus the most frequently used words to spot repetition.
- Copy the text or clear the box to start again.
Features
- Live word, character, sentence, paragraph and line counts
- Reading time at 200 words per minute and speaking time at 130
- Unique word count, average and longest word
- Top five words with frequency, ignoring common stop words
- Handles contractions, hyphenated words and non-Latin scripts
How words and sentences are counted
A word is a run of letters or digits, so don't counts as one word, well-known counts as one word and 3.5 counts as one word. Text in Devanagari, Arabic, CJK and other scripts is counted the same way. Sentences end at a full stop, question mark, exclamation mark or ellipsis followed by a space or the end of the text; abbreviations such as e.g. don't split a sentence because they're followed by a word, not a space and capital.
Different tools count slightly differently, and Microsoft Word, Google Docs and this counter can disagree by a word or two on text with unusual punctuation. For assignment limits, the definition your institution uses is the one that counts.
Reading and speaking time
Adults read prose silently at roughly 200–250 words per minute; this tool uses 200 as a conservative estimate. Speech is slower, around 130–150 words per minute for a clear presentation, so a five-minute talk is about 650 words. Technical material with numbers and code takes longer to read than the estimate suggests.