Word counter
Count words, characters, sentences, paragraphs and reading time as you type. Words are segmented properly, punctuation is not counted, nothing is uploaded.
Your text
Result
Counts
- Words
- 0
- Characters
- 0
- No spaces
- 0
- Sentences
- 0
- Paragraphs
- 0
- Lines
- 0
Reading time
Silent reading0 sec
Words are counted with your browser Unicode segmenter, so punctuation is never counted as a word.
Counting a draft you are still working on
A word count is most useful while the draft is moving, not once it is finished. The counts here update on every keystroke, so you can watch a section grow past its brief instead of discovering it afterwards.
- Paste or start typing in the box. Nothing is sent anywhere, which matters when the draft is a client brief or an unpublished article.
- Watch the word count as the primary number and the character count as the secondary one. Most commissioning briefs are in words; most platform limits are in characters.
- Use the sentence and paragraph counts to catch structure problems. A page of twelve sentences in two paragraphs is a wall of text whatever the word count says.
- Treat the reading estimate as a rough band rather than a figure to publish. It assumes uninterrupted silent reading of prose.
- Check which counting method the tool reports. Modern browsers give it Unicode word segmentation, and the fallback is noted on the page when segmentation is unavailable.
What this tool counts as a word
Every word counter has to answer a handful of small questions, and they answer them differently, which is why two tools disagree about the same paragraph. These are the answers in use here.
- Punctuation on its own is never a word. A line of dashes, an ellipsis or a run of exclamation marks adds nothing to the total.
- A contraction is one word. "It is" counts two and "it's" counts one, which is the behaviour writers expect and the reason the count drops when you contract.
- A hyphenated compound is one word. "Well-known" counts once here, matching most word processors, and the tool merges across the hyphen so the number does not change with the browser.
- Numbers count. "3" and "09:00" are words, because a brief that says eight hundred words did not mean eight hundred alphabetic ones.
- An emoji is not a word. It counts as a character and as nothing in the word total.
- Characters are counted as grapheme clusters, so an emoji or an accented letter counts once rather than as the two to eleven code units it is built from.
Reading time, and what the number is actually worth
Reading time is the stat people quote and the one with the least science behind it. It is a division, not a measurement, and knowing what it divides by tells you how far to trust it.
- The estimate here divides the word count by 238 words per minute, the median for silent reading of ordinary English prose in the research literature.
- Published estimates range from about 180 to 300 words per minute depending on the reader and the material, so treat the result as a band rather than a figure.
- Technical writing, tables and code read far slower than prose, and an article full of them will overrun the estimate substantially.
- Images, embeds and video are not in the count at all, so an illustrated piece takes longer than the number says.
- On a phone the same article takes longer than on a desktop, because the line length is shorter and the scrolling is not free.
- The number is most useful as a relative signal: a piece that reads in three minutes against one that reads in eleven is a real difference in commitment.
When the word count is the wrong thing to look at
Counting is easy, which is why it gets used as a proxy for judgement it cannot make. There are several cases where the number on the screen is not the number that decides anything.
- Social platforms count characters, not words. A caption at 180 words is meaningless against a 2,200 character ceiling, and a character counter is the tool for that.
- Search rankings have no word count threshold. Length correlates with covering a subject, and padding to a target is the reason so many recipe pages open with an essay.
- An essay limit is usually enforced by the institution's own counter, which may count differently from this one. Where the difference matters, trust theirs.
- A count cannot tell you whether the opening paragraph earns the second one, which is what actually decides whether the rest gets read.
- Cutting to hit a number tends to remove the examples first, and the examples are usually the part that made the argument land.
The rest of the job
You just fixed one post. Now do the month.
The word counter solves one piece of one post. OctoSpark plans, writes and schedules the whole calendar across every network you use, publishes it for you, and reports what actually performed.
- One calendar for every network
- Schedule once, publish everywhere
- Drafts written in your own voice
- See what actually performed
Open the full sign-up page
No card needed. These tools stay free either way.
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Frequently asked questions
How this tool works, what it cannot do, and what happens to what you put into it.
How does this tool count words?
It uses the browser Unicode segmenter where it is available, which understands word boundaries in scripts that do not separate words with spaces, and falls back to a Unicode-aware pattern when it is not. Hyphenated compounds and contractions are merged into single words so both paths report the same number.Does punctuation count as a word?
No. A word here has to start with a letter or a digit, so a lone dash, an ellipsis or a run of exclamation marks adds nothing. That is the difference you will notice against a counter that simply splits the text on spaces, which charges you for every stray mark.How is the reading time calculated?
The word count is divided by 238 words per minute, which is the median silent reading speed for English prose in published studies. It is a rough band, not a measurement: technical material, tables and images all push the real time up, and none of them are in the arithmetic.Will this match the count in Word or Google Docs?
Usually to within a word or two on plain prose. Differences appear around hyphenated compounds, numbers with units and text with footnote markers, because each tool draws the word boundary slightly differently. Where a hard limit is being enforced, use whichever counter the person enforcing it uses.Is my data private?
Yes. This tool does its work in your browser, so whatever you type, paste or upload stays on your device. Nothing is sent to our servers, which is also why it keeps working if you go offline after the page has loaded.Is this really free?
Yes. Every tool here is free with no account, no credit card and no usage cap. They exist so that the people who need our scheduling product find us, which only works if the tools are genuinely useful on their own.Do I need an account?
No. Open the page and use it. An account is only for OctoSpark itself, where you plan, schedule and publish a whole calendar rather than fixing one post at a time.Can I use the output commercially?
Yes. Anything you produce here is yours, including for client and commercial work. We claim no rights over it and we do not watermark it.