Word Counter

How to count words and characters in any text

What the counter shows

Paste or type any text into the box and the counter updates live, with no button to press. You get the word count, the character count both with and without spaces, the sentence count, the paragraph count, and a unique-word figure that shows how much of the text is actually new vocabulary. Every figure recalculates as you type, so you can watch a limit approach before you hit it.

How the counts work

A word is any run of letters, digits, or apostrophes, so don't counts as one word and well-known as two, because the hyphen splits it. Sentences are counted from ending punctuation: periods, exclamation marks, and question marks, and any run of them counts as one sentence, with a trailing line that has no punctuation still counted as a sentence. Paragraphs are counted from blank-line breaks. The unique count treats words case-insensitively, so Word and word are the same word. These are the same conventions most style guides and word processors use, so the figures line up with what a tutor or editor expects.

Word count versus character count

Most word-count limits, for essays, abstracts, and posts, count words, which is the top-line figure. But a growing number of platforms cap you on characters instead, and often on characters without spaces: social media posts, product titles, meta descriptions, and form fields all work this way. That is why this counter shows both character figures side by side, so you can check the one the platform actually enforces without doing the arithmetic yourself.

Typical uses

Assignments and essays. Most word processors count slightly differently from one another; this one uses the common academic rule of words as runs of characters with hyphens splitting, so the number you see here is the number to quote in a submission. SEO and content. Target lengths for posts, meta descriptions, and product copy are all word or character counts, and the characters-without-spaces figure is what many platforms cap you on. Speeches and subtitles. A comfortable speaking pace is roughly 130 to 160 words per minute, so 450 words is about a three-minute talk; the word count tells you your running time before you ever read it aloud. Editing. A surprisingly low unique-word ratio often means repetition; it is a quick signal to vary the vocabulary before the text goes anywhere.

Reading the unique-word figure

The unique-word count is the total divided by how many distinct words are in the text. A short slogan has a ratio close to one, because almost every word appears once. A long, repetitive email can drop well below that, which is a useful diagnostic: if the ratio is low and the text feels flat, the problem is usually the same three or four words doing all the work. It is not a quality score by itself, but as a second glance it catches dullness that a plain word count never would.

Privacy and speed

The counting happens entirely in your browser. The text you paste is never sent to a server, so it is safe to count a draft, a confidential document, or a password-adjacent string without worrying where it goes. There is no limit on length within reason, and because nothing travels over the network the counts are instant even for long documents. If you need to start over, clear the box and the figures fall back to zero.