Type or paste text to count words, characters with and without spaces, sentences and paragraphs, and to estimate reading and speaking time. Counts update as you type.
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0 / 5,000,000 characters (UTF-16 units)
Including spaces
Excluding all whitespace
Separated by blank lines
At 238 words per minute
At 130 words per minute
Every figure follows a few plain rules, so you can predict the result before you read it. A line break (including Windows-style CRLF) counts as one character.
Words: a word is any run of non-space characters that contains at least one letter or number. Hyphenated words (well-known), contractions (don't), decimals (3.14) and plain numbers each count as one word. A stray dash, an ampersand or an emoji on its own is not a word. For Chinese, Japanese, Thai, Lao, Khmer and Myanmar text, which has no spaces between words, the tool asks your browser's word segmenter (Intl.Segmenter) where the words begin and end.
Characters: the count is of characters as a reader sees them, so an emoji, a flag, a letter with a combining accent, or a Thai or Lao consonant with its SARA AM vowel counts as 1. Characters without spaces leaves out every kind of whitespace: spaces, tabs, line breaks and non-breaking spaces.
Sentences: a sentence ends at one or more of . ! ? or an ellipsis, followed by a space or the end of the text. Consecutive marks such as ?! or ... count once, and 3.14 or example.com do not split a sentence. The full-width marks used in Chinese and Japanese, and the Hindi danda, end a sentence even without a following space. Text left over at the end counts as one more sentence.
Paragraphs: a paragraph is a block of text separated from the next by at least one blank line (a line that is empty or holds only spaces).
Reading and speaking time: both are estimates from the word count. The tool uses 238 words per minute for silent reading and 130 words per minute for speaking aloud, which are commonly quoted averages. Your own pace will differ, and the result is rounded up to the next whole second.
reading seconds = ceil(words x 60 / 238) speaking seconds = ceil(words x 60 / 130) time shown = 'X sec' under one minute, 'X min Y sec' under one hour, otherwise 'X hr Y min' (plus 'Z sec' when not zero)
The text "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog." has 9 words, 44 characters with spaces and 36 without (it has 8 spaces). It is 1 sentence in 1 paragraph, and takes about 3 seconds to read and 5 seconds to say aloud.
"Wait... what?! Pi is 3.14. Done" has 6 words and 4 sentences: "Wait...", "what?!", "Pi is 3.14." and the unfinished "Done". The ellipsis and the ?! each count as one ending, and the decimal point inside 3.14 does not split anything.
1,000 words take 253 seconds to read at 238 words per minute (4 min 13 sec) and 462 seconds to speak at 130 words per minute (7 min 42 sec). Use it to plan a talk, a video script or a blog post length.
No. The counting runs in your browser, the text is not uploaded, and it is not stored between visits. Reloading or closing the page clears the box.
Tools make different choices about hyphens, dashes, emoji, line breaks and sentence endings. This page states its rules above so you can see exactly why a number comes out the way it does.
As one character each, as long as your browser supports Intl.Segmenter. If it does not, the tool falls back to counting Unicode code points, which can count a multi-part emoji as more than one.
They are estimates from average speeds (238 and 130 words per minute), not measurements of you. Dense technical writing, a slow delivery or pauses for slides will take longer.
Yes. Spaced scripts such as Hindi are counted by their spaces, and unspaced scripts such as Chinese and Japanese use your browser's word segmenter, so those word counts can differ slightly between browsers.
The box accepts up to 5,000,000 characters, counted as UTF-16 units, so an emoji or a character outside the basic range uses 2 of them; the Characters result above counts what a reader sees. Past 200,000 characters the counts may trail your typing by a moment so the box stays responsive.