Word counter

How the word count is worked out

The text is split on whitespace, and each piece counts as a word if it holds at least one letter or digit. So 42, iPhone 15 and re-entry all count, and a dash sitting on its own between two spaces does not. Hyphenated compounds — well-known, mother-in-law, two-thirds — are one word each, because there is no space inside them. If a brief needs them counted as parts, put spaces around the hyphens and the number moves.

Characters are counted as code points, so an emoji is one character rather than two. The second figure removes every space, tab and line break, which is the number forms mean when they say "characters excluding spaces". Systems that count in smaller units — X, SMS gateways, database columns — disagree with both figures once you leave plain ASCII, which is what the character counter page goes into.

Counts refresh 120 milliseconds after you stop typing rather than on every keystroke. The counting itself is not the slow part: a 50,000-word paste is measured in about ten milliseconds. The short pause exists so that typing stays smooth on a phone, where the browser has other work to do between keystrokes.

If you are writing to a target, check the count at the end of each section rather than each paragraph — it is less distracting and the number is more meaningful. Most briefs tolerate roughly ten per cent either side of the figure they set, and abstracts, footnotes, tables and reference lists are usually excluded from it. This page counts everything you paste, so paste only the part being marked.

Questions people ask

Why is this count different from Microsoft Word?

Word counts any run of characters between two spaces, so a standalone dash, an ampersand or a lone bullet adds to its total while this page skips them. The larger gaps come from what is included rather than how it is split: Word can count or ignore footnotes, endnotes, headers, text boxes and tracked changes depending on which dialogue you read the figure from, and it counts the reference list unless you select the body first. For ordinary prose the two agree to within about half a per cent. If someone marks your work in Word, leave yourself a little headroom rather than landing exactly on the limit.

How many pages is 1,000 words?

Roughly four pages double-spaced or two pages single-spaced, in a 12-point serif face with 2.5 cm margins — about 250 words a page double-spaced, 500 single-spaced. The font moves that number more than people expect: the same text set in 11-point can gain half a page over 12-point, and generous line spacing costs a page per thousand words. That is exactly why most departments set a word count instead of a page count. If your brief is in pages, settle which font and spacing it assumes before you start writing.

How is reading time calculated?

Reading time divides the word count by 238 words per minute, the mean silent reading rate for adults reading English non-fiction reported in a large 2019 review of reading-rate studies. Speaking time uses 130 words per minute, a figure commonly used for reading aloud to an audience, which is slower than conversation because presenters pause and emphasise. Both are averages over a wide spread — comfortable silent reading runs from about 175 to 300 words per minute depending on the reader and how dense the material is. Under a minute the estimate is shown in seconds, and above it rounded up to the next whole minute.

How are sentences and paragraphs counted?

A sentence ends at a full stop, question mark or exclamation mark followed by a space or by the end of the text. A short list of abbreviations — Mr, Dr, etc, vs and a dozen more — is not treated as an ending, nor is any initialism written with single letters and dots, such as U.S.A. or e.g. A decimal point inside 3.14 never was an ending, because no space follows it, and an ellipsis in the middle of a line is read as a pause. The list is deliberately short, so a rarer abbreviation such as Ph.D. or Sept. will still split one sentence into two. Paragraphs are runs of text separated by at least one blank line; a single line break inside a paragraph does not start a new one.

How does it count Chinese and Japanese text?

Chinese and Japanese are written without spaces between words, so splitting on whitespace would report one enormous word. When the text contains Han characters, hiragana or katakana, each of those characters counts as one word — the convention publishers and translation agencies use when quoting for length. Latin words mixed into the same passage are still counted normally, so a Japanese sentence containing an English product name adds up sensibly. Korean is written with spaces, so Hangul is counted the ordinary way rather than character by character.

Is my text sent anywhere?

No. The counting happens in a small JavaScript file that runs inside this tab. Nothing is uploaded, nothing is written to storage on our side, and no cookie or local storage keeps a copy — close the tab and the draft is gone. You can check it yourself: open the Network panel in your browser's developer tools, paste a few paragraphs, and watch that no request leaves the page. Once the page has loaded it keeps working with the network disconnected entirely.