Word and character counter
Paste an essay, assignment or caption to see its length straight away. Counts update as you type.
Counter
Your text stays in this browser tab and is not uploaded.
Results
- Words
- 0
- Characters
- 0
- Characters without spaces
- 0
- Sentences
- 0
- Paragraphs
- 0
- Lines
- 0
How to use the word counter
- Type in the box, or paste text from a document, web page or email.
- Read the counts underneath. They change as you edit, so you can trim an essay to a word limit while you watch.
- Use Copy text to take your edited text back to your document, or Clear text to start again.
What each number means
- Words: runs of letters or numbers. Contractions such as don't count as one word. Hyphenated words such as well-known may count as two, as they do in many word processors.
- Characters: every visible character, including spaces, punctuation and line breaks. An emoji, or a letter with an accent, counts as one character even when the computer stores it as several code units.
- Characters without spaces: the same count with spaces, tabs and line breaks left out. Some assignments and forms use this figure.
- Sentences: text ending in a full stop, question mark or exclamation mark. Urdu (۔), Arabic (؟) and Chinese or Japanese (。) sentence endings are recognised too.
- Paragraphs: blocks of text separated by at least one empty line.
- Lines: the number of lines, counting blank lines in the middle. One line break at the very end does not add a line.
Worked examples
A short paragraph
Photosynthesis turns light into chemical energy. Plants, algae and some bacteria do it.
It happens mainly in the leaves.Result: 19 words, 121 characters, 102 characters without spaces, 3 sentences, 2 paragraphs and 3 lines (the empty line in the middle counts as a line).
Accents and emoji
Café au lait ☕ is my favourite.Result: 6 words and 31 characters. The é and the coffee emoji count as one character each, and the emoji is not counted as a word.
Urdu text
پاکستان ایک خوبصورت ملک ہے۔Result: 5 words, 27 characters and 1 sentence, ending with the Urdu full stop (۔).
Questions and answers
- Why is my count different from Microsoft Word or Google Docs?
- Every program has its own rules for things like hyphenated words, numbers with dots, dashes and web addresses, so small differences are normal. If a teacher or journal sets a limit, check which program they use to count.
- Does it work for languages other than English?
- Yes. Words are found with your browser’s built-in language rules (
Intl.Segmenter), which also work for Urdu, Arabic, Hindi, Chinese, Japanese and many others. For Chinese and Japanese, which are written without spaces, word counts are an estimate. - Is my text saved or sent anywhere?
- No. Counting happens in this tab and nothing is uploaded. The site does not save the text; some browsers may restore what you typed if you reload the page.
- Is there a length limit?
- There is no fixed limit. Very long texts of a million characters or more still work, but counts may take a moment to update on older phones.