Word Counter

What this word counter measures

Length limits are everywhere: a 280-character post, a 650-word application essay, a 150-character meta description, a 20-minute talk. This counter gives you every common measure at once and updates live, so you can watch a draft approach its target instead of checking afterwards. Besides the raw counts it shows how long the text takes to read or to say aloud, how varied your vocabulary is and which words you lean on most, which is useful for spotting repetition and for checking keyword use in web copy.

How words, sentences and paragraphs are counted

A word is any run of letters or digits, including letters with accents, optionally joined by apostrophes or hyphens. So "don't", "well-known" and "2024" are one word each, while "1,500" counts as two. Characters are counted two ways, with and without whitespace. A sentence ends at a period, exclamation or question mark followed by a space (so "3.14" does not split), and a final chunk without punctuation still counts. Paragraphs are blocks separated by a blank line. Reading and speaking time are simply:

Reading time = words ÷ 238 wpm    Speaking time = words ÷ 150 wpm

Example: the sample text has 100 words, 563 characters (464 without spaces), 5 sentences and 2 paragraphs. Reading time is 100 ÷ 238 = 0.42 minutes, which is 0.42 × 60 ≈ 25 seconds; speaking time is 100 ÷ 150 = 0.67 minutes ≈ 40 seconds. The 72 unique words out of 100 show a fairly varied vocabulary, and the keyword table reveals that "count" and "words" each appear four times.

How to use this word counter

1. Paste or type your text into the box. Press Clear first if you want to start from an empty page.
2. Read the word count in the result panel and the detailed counts below it; everything updates as you edit.
3. Check the reading or speaking time against your target, for example a 5-minute talk needs roughly 750 words.
4. Scan the keyword table for words you repeat too often, or to confirm a target keyword appears a sensible number of times.

Typical lengths

Reading and speaking speed

The 238 words per minute figure comes from Marc Brysbaert's 2019 meta-analysis of 190 studies of silent reading in English; fiction is read slightly faster (about 260 wpm) and technical or unfamiliar material much slower. Average adults speak at 120 to 160 words per minute in conversation, and 150 wpm is the pace most presentation coaches recommend. Audiobook narrators are typically 150 to 160 wpm. Treat the times as a planning estimate: slides, pauses and questions add to speaking time, and readers skim web pages faster than they read a report.

Tips and limitations

• Limits differ by tool. Word processors, Twitter and submission portals each have their own counting rules; stay a few words or characters under any hard limit.
• Numbers with separators such as "1,500" and "3.5" count as two words here; write them without separators if exact word counts matter.
• Blank lines define paragraphs. Text with single line breaks between paragraphs is counted as one paragraph.
• Keyword frequency ignores about 85 common English words (the, and, of, is…) and single letters, so the table highlights meaningful terms. It does not stem words, so "count" and "counts" are listed separately.
• Need filler text of a specific length to test a layout? The lorem ipsum generator produces an exact number of words. To average word counts across several drafts, use the average calculator.