About the word counter

A counting box for people writing to a limit — a 500-word brief, a 280-character post, a two-page cover letter. It reports what it measures and says how it measured it.

Every counter has to decide what a word is before it can total them up, and the decisions are rarely written down. When two tools disagree by forty words on the same essay, the disagreement is a definition, not a bug. So the definitions are on this page, in the open, and you can hold the tool to them.

How each figure is defined

Words. The text is cut at every run of whitespace, and a fragment counts as a word if it contains at least one letter or digit in any alphabet. That keeps 2026, β-carotene and café, and drops a bullet, an ampersand or a dash floating between two spaces. Nothing inside a fragment splits it, so mother-in-law, don't and read/write are one word apiece. Chinese and Japanese have no spaces to cut on, so each Han, hiragana or katakana character is counted as a word instead — the length convention translation agencies quote in.

Characters. Counted in Unicode code points rather than the UTF-16 pairs JavaScript stores them in, so a single emoji reads as one character and not two. The second figure subtracts every space, tab and newline; that is the number a form usually wants when it asks for characters excluding spaces.

Sentences. A full stop, question mark or exclamation mark closes a sentence when whitespace or the end of the text follows it. Roughly twenty common abbreviations are exempt, and so is any initialism spelled with single letters and stops. Anything rarer is not exempt, so an unusual abbreviation will split one sentence into two.

Paragraphs. Blocks separated by at least one empty line. A soft line break inside a block — a wrapped line, a line of dialogue, an address — does not open a new paragraph, which is why pasting a poem gives you fewer paragraphs than you might expect.

Time. Reading time divides words by 238 a minute and speaking time by 130. They are population averages, useful for sizing a talk or an article, not a promise about any one reader.

Why the number differs from Word or Google Docs

Microsoft Word counts every run of characters between two spaces, without asking whether the run contains a letter. Set a poem or a costed list in front of both tools and Word will run ahead, because its total includes the stray dashes, currency symbols and lone numerals that this page skips. On flowing prose the two land within about half a per cent of each other.

The bigger gaps have nothing to do with splitting. Word's figure changes depending on whether footnotes, endnotes, headers, text boxes and tracked changes are folded in, and by default it counts your bibliography along with your argument. Google Docs is stricter about hyphens — it can treat well-known as two words where this page treats it as one — and its live counter ignores headers, footers and footnotes altogether. Paste the same three pages into all three and you should expect three answers.

The practical advice: find out which tool the person marking your work will open, and leave yourself a few per cent of headroom rather than landing exactly on the limit. Paste only the section being counted, since this page counts everything in the box, title and references included.

What it does not do

No grammar or spelling checking. There is no dictionary in the page and no service behind it, so nothing here can tell you a sentence is clumsy or a comma is wrong — your writing tool and your own ear are better at that than a counter would be.

No keyword density. Repeating a phrase to hit a percentage has not been a workable tactic for a long time, and printing the number invites people to write for it.

No readability score. Flesch–Kincaid and its relatives are arithmetic on sentence length and syllable counts; they cannot see whether a passage makes sense, and a short sentence full of jargon scores well while reading badly. If you need one for a house style guide, use a tool that is honest about the formula it applies.

It also keeps no history. There is no draft list, no autosave and no account, because there is no server to hold any of it — see the privacy policy for exactly what that means for your text.

Who made it

One independent developer, tired of counters that want a sign-up before they will total a paragraph. The page is static: markup, one stylesheet, one small script. If a count looks wrong, send the sample that reproduces it — that is usually enough to find the definition at fault.