Word counter

Counting words the way editors do

Essays, college applications, job ads, meta descriptions and social posts all come with limits. This counter uses the Unicode text-segmentation rules built into your browser, the same standard word processors follow, so contractions like don't and numbers like 2026 count as one word and punctuation is ignored. Hyphenated compounds such as well-known count as two words, as in Microsoft Word and Google Docs.

Characters are counted as you would see them, so an emoji with a skin tone or a letter with an accent counts once.

Reading time

Adults read non-fiction silently at about 238 words per minute and aloud at about 183, according to a 2019 review of 190 studies by Marc Brysbaert. A 1,200-word article takes about 5 minutes to read and 6½ minutes to present.

Worked example

Hello, world. It’s 2026! followed by a blank line and New paragraph here. has 7 words, 3 sentences and 2 paragraphs.

The page splits your text with Intl.Segmenter, which implements Unicode Standard Annex #29, using the page's language. Segments marked as word-like are counted as words; sentence segments containing at least one letter or digit are counted as sentences. Characters are grapheme clusters, the units you see on screen. Paragraphs are blocks of text separated by a blank line. Reading and speaking times divide the word count by 238 and 183 words per minute. Everything runs in your browser.