Word counter online free

How to use the word & character counter

1. Type into the box, or paste an article, essay or video script into it. There is no character limit and nothing is sent anywhere.
2. Read the six counters underneath. They update on every keystroke, so you can watch a paragraph land on a target length instead of guessing.
3. Drag the reading speed slider if the default 230 words per minute is wrong for your audience. Voiceover scripts usually sit nearer 150.
4. Press Copy text to lift the whole box back to your clipboard, or Clear to empty it and start on the next section.

What you can use it for

Meeting a hard limit is the obvious one. University essays, LinkedIn posts capped at 3,000 characters, meta descriptions that have to stay under 155, Google Ads headlines at 30 — all of these fail silently if you overshoot, and none of the editors you write them in will warn you.

YouTube scripting is the case this tool gets used for most. A ten-minute video is roughly 1,400 to 1,600 spoken words. Set the slider to 150 wpm, paste your draft, and the read-time counter tells you whether you are about to record a six-minute video or a fourteen-minute one — before you sit down at the mic.

Bloggers use the paragraph counter as a readability check rather than a word check. If 1,800 words are spread across nine paragraphs, the post is a wall of text and mobile readers will bounce. Twenty-five paragraphs over the same length reads far more comfortably on a phone.

Freelancers who bill per word can settle an invoice question in seconds. Paste the delivered draft, screenshot the count, attach it to the invoice. It also catches the opposite problem: a 900-word piece quietly delivered against a 1,200-word brief.

Things to know

A word here means any run of characters separated by whitespace, which is how nearly every editor and client counts. Hyphenated compounds like "state-of-the-art" count as one word. Numbers count as words. An em dash sitting alone between spaces does not.

Sentences are detected by full stops, question marks and exclamation marks followed by a space or the end of the text. Abbreviations such as "Dr." or "e.g." will occasionally inflate that number by one or two. The count is a guide to sentence length, not a parser.

Paragraphs are counted as blocks separated by a blank line. If you paste from a Word document that uses single line breaks instead, you may see one paragraph where you expected several. Add a blank line between blocks for an accurate figure.

Everything runs on your own machine, which means it also works with the wifi off. Load the page once and you can keep counting on a flight. It handles Hindi, Tamil, Arabic and any other Unicode script, though reading-speed estimates are calibrated on English and will be rough elsewhere.

Frequently asked questions