BrowserTools

Word Counter

Words, characters, sentences, reading time

By Guga — BrowserTools maintainer, Tbilisi, Georgia Updated 2026-09-03
Free Private No uploads
What is Word Counter?

Eight figures update as you type, and they follow rules worth knowing because different counters disagree. A word here is a run of characters separated by whitespace, so the comma in Hello, stays attached to the word and a hyphenated phrase counts as two. A sentence ends at a run of stops followed by whitespace, which means the abbreviation in Dr. Smith starts a new one and inflates the total. Characters are counted the way JavaScript counts string length, which means an emoji adds two and a combining accent adds one more. Paragraphs are blocks separated by a blank line, and reading time assumes 200 words a minute with speaking at 130. Chinese, Japanese and Korean text has no spaces, so a whole run of it counts as a single word here.

Count words, characters (with and without spaces), sentences, paragraphs and estimated reading time as you type. The essential companion for essays, tweets, blog posts and meta descriptions.

Private Word Counter In Your Browser

Word Counter is processed locally with client-side JavaScript. Your files never touch a server, and there is no queue to wait in.

Step-by-Step

How to use Word Counter

1

Type or paste into the textarea marked Your text; every figure recalculates immediately.

2

Read the eight tiles: words, characters, characters without spaces, sentences, paragraphs, lines, average word length and reading time.

3

Use the line under the tiles for the speaking-time estimate at a slower 130 words a minute.

4

Correct for the rules above if a submission has a strict limit — count before adding a title.

Key Capabilities
  • Eight live statistics covering words, characters, sentences, paragraphs, lines and average word length
  • Character count with and without whitespace, as different limits require
  • Reading time at 200 words a minute alongside speaking time at 130
  • Paragraph and line counts that both ignore blank entries
Common Use Cases
  • A student checking an essay against the word limit set by a department.
  • A social media manager confirming a caption fits the character allowance for a platform.
  • A copywriter estimating how long a blog post takes to read before setting a publication date.
Clear Answers

Frequently Asked Questions

Why is Dr. Smith counted as two sentences?
Because the rule is a run of stops followed by whitespace, and the full stop in Dr. is followed by a space. No abbreviation list is consulted, which keeps the count predictable but means titles, decimals and initials all cost you a sentence. If a limit is strict, add back the abbreviations in your text by hand.
Why does an emoji count as two characters?
Because the count uses string length, which measures UTF-16 code units. A character sitting above the basic multilingual plane is stored as a surrogate pair and takes two of them, while an ordinary accented letter that is precomposed takes one. Counting by code points would report the same total as counting visible symbols, but neither is what most submission boxes do.
How does it handle Chinese, Japanese or Korean text?
Poorly, and unavoidably with a whitespace rule. Those scripts do not put spaces between words, so an entire sentence with no spaces is counted as one word while its characters pile up. Word segmentation for those languages needs a dictionary and real parsing, which is well outside what a counter can do cheaply.
Do odd characters break it?
No. A null byte or a stray, incomplete surrogate is treated as an ordinary character and counted rather than throwing an error, so pasting binary or damaged text will not blank the panel. The counts are still honest — those characters take up space — but they are not letters.

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