Word counter
Count the words in a draft. Characters, sentences, and reading time sit beside the total.
Paste a draft, or load the sample, to count words.
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Word count
No text yet. Paste, type, or load the sample.
A word is a stretch between spaces that contains at least one letter or number. Punctuation stuck to a word does not split it.
0words
- Characters without spaces
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- Average word length
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How to use the word counter
- Paste or type the draft into the box. The total updates shortly after you pause, so a long paste does not recompute on every key.
- Choose “Load sample text” if you want a known passage with several paragraphs before you replace it with your own.
- Read the large word total first. The smaller figures are there so you can jump to the question you actually have.
- Open the character counter, the sentence counter, or reading time when that smaller figure is the one a brief asked for.
What this page treats as a word
A word is the stretch of text between whitespace, but only if that stretch contains at least one letter or number. Spaces, tabs, and line breaks separate words. Punctuation that is stuck to a word does not create a new one, so “hello,” is one word and so is “2024”. A token that is only an em dash or a row of asterisks is ignored, because counting it would inflate a draft that uses horizontal rules.
“Well-known” stays one word. “New York” is two. That will not match every publisher’s style sheet, and it is not trying to. The point of a separate word counter, rather than a single crowded dashboard, is to keep this rule visible while you edit. If a style guide wants hyphenated compounds split, search for the hyphen and decide case by case. The character counter is the better check when the limit is letters and spaces rather than tokens.
Average word length is the mean number of letters and numbers in those tokens. Punctuation is not part of the average, so a forest of commas does not make the vocabulary look longer than it is. It is a surface statistic. It does not know which words are jargon.
How the time summaries fit
Under the word total you will see a silent-reading estimate at 238 words per minute and a speaking estimate at 150. Those numbers are the same defaults documented on the reading time andspeaking time pages. They are summaries. This page does not pretend that every reader hits 238, and it does not add time for pauses, slides, or rereading. Change the pace on the dedicated calculator when the audience is a specialist, a child, or a room you have to address out loud.
Sentence and paragraph totals are also summaries. A paragraph here is a blank-line block, which is why a PDF paste full of hard wraps can look like one paragraph until you remove line breaks or read the paragraph counter rules. Readability is a different question again: short words can still be a hard idea. Use the readability checker when someone asked for a Flesch score rather than a word total.
Limitations
- This is an English, space-separated count. Chinese, Japanese, and Thai text will not match a reader’s sense of a word, because those writing systems do not separate words with spaces.
- It is not the Word or Google Docs algorithm, and it does not expand fields, footnotes, or tracked changes. Only the characters in the box are counted.
- Emoji are not words unless they sit in a token that also has a letter or number. They do count as characters on the character counter.
- Drafts longer than 500,000 characters are refused so the page stays responsive. Split a book-length paste into chapters.
Questions people ask
Does the word counter upload my draft?
No. The count runs in the browser after the page loads. TextStats does not receive the paragraph as part of the word count. If you need the longer version of that promise, the privacy policy separates the text in the box from the request that merely downloaded the page.
Why does this total differ from Microsoft Word or Google Docs?
Those editors use their own rules for hyphens, numbers, and fields such as captions. This page counts a whitespace-separated token that contains a letter or a number. “end.” is one word. An em dash with no letters is not a word. The rule is printed above the result so you can see why a total moved.
Is a hyphenated word one word or two?
One, if there is no space. “Well-known” is a single token. “Well known” is two. If you need the pieces counted separately, add a space or count the characters instead.
Can I count only the selected sentence?
The counter reads the whole box. Paste the selection, or delete the part you do not want included. There is no account storing the longer draft, so keep your original in your own editor.
The reading time looks wrong for my audience. What now?
The summary on this page uses 238 words per minute for silent reading and 150 for speaking. Those are defaults, not a measurement of the reader. Open the reading time calculator or the speaking time calculator when you need to change the pace.