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Word counter

A word counter reports the number of words, characters, sentences and paragraphs in a passage of text. A word is any run of characters separated by whitespace. Reading time is estimated at 238 words per minute for silent adult reading and 150 words per minute for spoken delivery, so a 1,000-word article takes about 4 minutes to read and 7 minutes to say aloud.

Calculated in your browser — nothing is uploaded.

Result

words

35

words = tokens separated by one or more whitespace characters

Characters (with spaces)
225
Characters (no spaces)
190
Sentences
3
Paragraphs
2
Lines
3
Reading time (238 wpm)
1 min
Speaking time (150 wpm)
1 min
Longest word
recalculate

The text contains 35 words, 225 characters including spaces, 190 characters excluding spaces, 3 sentences and 2 paragraphs. Reading it aloud takes about 1 minute; reading it silently takes about 1.

How to use the word counter

  1. 01

    Paste or type your text

    Enter text into the box. The count updates as you type, with no button to press and no upload step.

  2. 02

    Watch the word count

    The result strip shows the word count in large type. It is the figure most word limits are specified in.

  3. 03

    Check the other measures

    The rows beneath give characters with and without spaces, sentences, paragraphs, lines and the longest word.

  4. 04

    Use the reading estimates

    Reading time at 238 words per minute and speaking time at 150 help size an article or a talk against a slot.

The formula

words = whitespace-separated tokens        reading minutes = words ÷ 238
150
Typical spoken delivery rate in words per minute for presentations.
238
Mean silent reading rate in words per minute for adults reading non-fiction English.
words
Runs of non-whitespace characters, counted after trimming leading and trailing space.
characters
Unicode code points, so an emoji or an accented letter counts as one character.
sentences
Runs of text terminated by a full stop, question mark or exclamation mark, with repeated terminators collapsed.

The 238 words-per-minute figure comes from Brysbaert's 2019 meta-analysis of 190 reading-rate studies covering more than 18,000 participants. Rates vary widely by text difficulty and reader: silent reading of fiction averages nearer 260 wpm, and dense technical material considerably less.

Worked example

Text
"The quick brown fox. It jumped over the lazy dog!"
Result
10 words, 49 characters, 2 sentences

Splitting on whitespace gives ten tokens: The, quick, brown, fox., It, jumped, over, the, lazy, dog!. Counting every code point including spaces gives 49 characters, and 40 with spaces removed. Two terminators — the full stop and the exclamation mark — mark two sentences. At 238 words per minute, reading time rounds up to the one-minute floor.

Frequently asked questions

How is a word counted?

A word is any unbroken run of characters bounded by whitespace. Hyphenated compounds such as "well-known" count as one word, and a number such as "1,250" also counts as one. This matches the counting method used by Microsoft Word and Google Docs, so results align with the tools most word limits are checked in.

How many pages is 1,000 words?

Roughly two pages double-spaced or one page single-spaced, in 12-point Times New Roman with one-inch margins — the standard academic format. A single-spaced page holds about 500 words and a double-spaced page about 250. Font, spacing and margins change the figure substantially, so a page count is always an approximation.

How long does it take to read 1,000 words?

About four minutes at the adult average silent reading rate of 238 words per minute. Reading aloud is considerably slower, at roughly seven minutes for the same passage at a typical presentation pace of 150 words per minute. Dense technical or unfamiliar material can halve both figures.

What is the difference between characters with and without spaces?

Characters with spaces counts every character including spaces, tabs and line breaks. Characters without spaces counts only visible glyphs. Publishing and translation contracts frequently price by characters without spaces, while social platforms count characters with spaces — X allows 280 including spaces, and a meta description should stay under about 155.

How many words should an article be for search ranking?

There is no threshold length that ranks. Length correlates with performance only because thorough answers tend to be longer, not because length itself is a ranking factor. What matters is covering the query completely and being extractable. In practice, 1,200 to 2,000 words is common for competitive informational queries, and far shorter is fine for a direct factual answer.

Is my text sent anywhere when I use this counter?

No. All counting happens inside your browser using JavaScript running on this page. The text is never transmitted, logged or stored, and this site has no server-side code capable of receiving it. Closing the tab discards it entirely, which makes the tool safe for drafts, contracts and confidential material.

Sources

Last reviewed: · Formula and sources verified by Syed Aqeel Ahmad Gillani. See the methodology for how every calculation is derived.

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