Word counter

Counts words, characters, sentences and reading time while you type.

Paste your text and the counters update instantly. Words, characters with and without spaces, sentences, lines, paragraphs, reading time — all of it, live, as you type. Useful for essays with a word limit, meta descriptions, ad copy and social posts.

What counts toward a word count — and what your marker counts

The most common question about word counts is not how the number is produced but what belongs in it, because a tool and a person can disagree. A counter measures every word you give it. Your university, journal or client, on the other hand, has rules about which parts of the document the limit applies to — and those rules decide whether you are over.

The short version, following the guidance most universities publish: the word count normally includes the main body of your text, in-text citations, quotations and (usually) footnotes. It normally excludes the title page, the reference list or bibliography, appendices, and tables and figures. But this varies by institution and by assignment, so the rule that matters is the one on your brief — the points below are the common default, not a guarantee.

• In-text citations — normally counted. "(Smith, 2024)" is part of your sentence, and it counts.
• The reference list or bibliography — normally not counted. It sits outside the argument, so paste the body without it to get the figure your marker sees.
• Footnotes and endnotes — usually counted, and a frequent trap: moving text into footnotes to duck a limit often does not work, because they count too. Check your brief.
• Headings and the title — the title page is usually excluded; headings within the body are usually counted.
• Tables, figures and their captions — usually excluded from the count, though some briefs include caption text.
• Quotations — counted. A long quote uses up your allowance like any other words.

Because a counter cannot know which of these your document contains, the reliable method is to paste only the parts that count. If references are excluded, leave them out of the box.

How to use it

1. Paste or type your text in the box above.
2. Read the counters below the box — they update on every keystroke.
3. To match your marker, paste only the parts that count toward the limit — usually the body and citations, not the reference list.
4. Use Copy to take the text back, or Download .txt to save it.

What this tool does

The word counter reads the text in the box on every keystroke and reports six numbers: words, characters, characters without spaces, sentences, lines and estimated reading time. Nothing is submitted and there is no button to press — the figures move while you type or paste.

A word here is any run of letters, digits or apostrophes bounded by spaces, tabs or line breaks. That single rule decides most of the edge cases people argue about:

• state-of-the-art is one word, because the hyphens are not separators.
• don't is one word, not two.
• 2026 and $1,400 each count as one word.
• email@example.com counts as one word.
• An em dash surrounded by spaces — like this one — is not counted at all.

Sentences are counted by terminal punctuation, so a period, question mark or exclamation mark ends one. Abbreviations such as e.g. can inflate that number slightly; treat the sentence figure as a guide to rhythm rather than an exact count.

How Google Docs, Microsoft Word and Excel count words

Every editor uses a slightly different rule, which is why the same paragraph gives three different numbers. If a tutor or a client set the limit in a specific program, check the number there before you submit.

Differences of one or two percent between tools are normal. If you are writing to a 500-word cap, aim for 480–495 and no editor will call it over.

Typical length targets

Most writing tasks have a conventional length rather than a hard rule. These are the numbers people actually check against:

When you need it

The counter earns its keep whenever a number is attached to the text:

• Assignments with a limit. Paste a draft and watch the number instead of trusting a page count.
• SEO fields. Titles and descriptions are measured in characters; the character line tells you whether the snippet will be cut off.
• Paid writing. Freelance rates are usually per 100 or per 1000 words, so the count is the invoice.
• Scripts and voiceover. Divide the word count by 130 to get speaking minutes, which is close enough to plan a video.
• Translation quotes. Agencies price on source words, and translated text usually grows: English to German by roughly a third, English to Russian by about 15%.

Doing it without this tool

If you would rather stay in the program you already have open:

• Google Docs: Ctrl+Shift+C, or select a passage and open Tools → Word count to count only that passage.
• Microsoft Word: the status bar shows a running total; click it to open the full dialog. Selecting text switches it to x of y words.
• Excel: =SUMPRODUCT(LEN(TRIM(A1:A50))-LEN(SUBSTITUTE(TRIM(A1:A50)," ",""))+1) counts a whole column.
• Notepad++: View → Summary lists words, characters, lines and selected characters.
• Command line: wc -w file.txt for words, wc -m for characters, wc -l for lines. On Windows PowerShell, (Get-Content file.txt -Raw).Split(' ').Count gets close.

All of these work. The reason to paste into a browser tab instead is that you often want the count for something that is not in a document yet — a caption, a form field, a chunk of an email.

Privacy: your text never leaves your browser

The counting is plain JavaScript running on the page you already loaded. There is no upload, no background request, no server-side copy and no database. Close the tab and the text is gone; reload the page and the box is empty.

That matters more than it sounds. Drafts pasted into a counter routinely contain unpublished articles, cover letters, legal wording and client material under NDA. You can confirm the behaviour yourself: open the Network tab of your browser developer tools, type into the box, and watch that no request is made.

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Frequently asked questions