Word Counter
Paste text to count words, characters, sentences, paragraphs, and more
What is a word counter?
A word counter is a tool that tallies the number of individual words in a piece of text. It is used by writers, students, journalists, and professionals to meet word count requirements for essays, articles, social media posts, and legal documents.
Modern word counters go beyond simple word counts — they also track characters, sentences, paragraphs, reading time, and the frequency of individual words, giving writers a comprehensive picture of their text.
What do each of these stats mean?
- Words — a sequence of characters separated by whitespace. Hyphenated words (e.g. "well-being") count as one word.
- Characters — every character including spaces, punctuation, and line breaks.
- Characters (no spaces) — useful for platforms like Twitter/X that used to count without spaces, or for typesetting calculations.
- Sentences — groups of words ending with a period, exclamation mark, or question mark.
- Paragraphs — blocks of text separated by blank lines.
- Reading time — estimated at 200 words per minute, the average adult silent reading speed.
Word count requirements for common writing types
| Type | Typical word count |
|---|---|
| Tweet / X post | Up to 280 characters (≈ 40–60 words) |
| Blog post (short) | 500–800 words |
| Blog post (long-form / SEO) | 1,500–3,000 words |
| College essay | 500–650 words |
| Short story | 1,000–7,500 words |
| Novel | 80,000–100,000 words |
| LinkedIn article | 1,000–2,000 words |
Frequently asked questions
Words are counted by splitting text on whitespace (spaces, tabs, newlines) and counting each resulting non-empty segment. Punctuation attached to a word (e.g. "end." or "Hello,") is treated as part of that word.
No. All processing happens entirely in your browser using JavaScript. Your text never leaves your device and is never sent to any server.
Reading time is estimated by dividing the word count by 200 — the average silent reading speed for adults in words per minute (WPM). Complex or technical text may take longer; simple text may be faster.
Yes. Any contiguous sequence of non-whitespace characters counts as a word, including numbers like "2024" or "3.14".
The top keywords section shows the most frequently occurring meaningful words in your text, filtered to remove common short words (the, a, an, is, etc.). This helps identify the main themes of your text.