Word Counter
Count words, characters, sentences and reading time as you type.
What you provide
How this calculation works
The tool splits your text on whitespace to count words, counts characters with and without spaces, detects sentence and paragraph boundaries, and estimates reading time at 238 words per minute. It all happens live in your browser.
What the results mean
- Words
- Runs of non-space characters. This matches how word processors count, so a hyphenated compound is one word.
- Characters (no spaces)
- The character count excluding whitespace — the figure some platforms use for limits.
- Reading time
- An estimate at 238 words per minute. A useful yardstick, not a promise — skimming is faster, technical prose slower.
Common problems and fixes
- The count differs from the limit I am writing to
- Confirm which figure the limit uses. Academic word limits usually exclude references and sometimes footnotes and captions, which pasted text includes. Character limits on social platforms count differently again, and several count a URL as a fixed length whatever its real one. Check the rule before editing to meet a number.
- Pasting from a PDF gives a strange sentence count
- PDF text arrives broken at every visual line and often with hyphenated words split across the break, so sentence detection sees boundaries that are not there and words that are split in two. Run it through the line break remover first, and the counts come out close to the original document.
- The reading time seems wrong for my audience
- It assumes 238 words per minute for adult silent reading of prose. Technical material, documentation with code, and anything read in a second language run substantially slower — often half that. The word count itself is exact; the time is a conversion at one rate, and worth adjusting for what you are actually writing.
Frequently asked questions
Does this match the word count in my word processor?
Very closely, because both count runs of non-space characters. Tiny differences can appear around hyphens, em-dashes and stray symbols, but for any normal document the totals agree.
Is my text sent anywhere?
No. Counting happens entirely in your browser as you type. There is no request carrying your text — you can confirm that in your network panel.
Are numbers and symbols counted as words?
Yes, if they are separated by spaces. "£4.99" is one word, and so is "2026" — the same as your word processor, which counts runs of non-space characters rather than trying to judge what qualifies as a real word. It is the only convention that gives consistent results across languages and document types.
Does it update as I type or do I have to press something?
It updates live on every keystroke, which is what makes it usable while drafting to a limit rather than as a check at the end. There is no button and no submit step, and equally no request — the recalculation happens in the page each time the text changes.
Put this on your own site
Free to embed, no attribution required beyond the source link the frame carries itself. It runs entirely in your visitor's browser, sets no cookies and loads no third-party script.
<iframe src="https://runthetests.com/embed/word-counter/" width="100%" height="560" style="border:1px solid #e5e5e5;border-radius:8px" title="Word Counter" loading="lazy"></iframe>
Preview it at https://runthetests.com/embed/word-counter/. Embedded pages are marked noindex, so yours stays the canonical copy — not this one.