Free Word Counter

What is a word counter?

A word counter is a tool that measures the length of a piece of writing — how many words, characters, sentences and paragraphs it contains — instead of making you guess or scroll back up to check by hand. This one works as a word count tool whenever you just need the number of words, and as a character counter whenever you are up against a strict character limit: a tweet, a meta description, a form field, a database column. Paste or type into the box above and every figure below it updates live, with nothing to submit and no button to click.

It is built to be a free word counter that works for real multilingual writing, not just English. The counting logic underneath is not simply 'split on spaces' — it also handles languages such as Chinese and Japanese, where spaces do not mark word boundaries at all, and it counts characters the way a reader actually sees them rather than the way a programming language happens to store them. The rest of this page explains exactly how those numbers are produced, so you know what you are looking at instead of trusting a black box.

How to use it

1. Paste or type your text into the box at the top. There is nothing to submit and no count button — every statistic below recalculates on every keystroke, so you can watch the numbers change as you write or edit.
2. Read the stats as they update. The first row shows Words, Characters, Characters (no spaces), Sentences and Paragraphs; the row below adds Unique words, Lines, Average word length and Average sentence length, plus a Reading time and Speaking time estimate.
3. Open the extra panels for detail. Expand How characters are counted to see the same text measured three ways — characters, Unicode code points and UTF-16 code units — and check the keyword density table for your ten most frequent words, adjusting the minimum word length (1, 3 or 5 characters) to filter out short filler. Use Copy to grab the text or Clear to start over.

What counts as a word, and what counts as a character

There is no universal agreement on what counts as a word, so it helps to know the rule this tool uses before you rely on the number. Most simple word counters just split text on whitespace, which quietly breaks for languages that do not separate words with spaces. The Chinese sentence 我喜欢编程和阅读书籍 is a single 'word' to a whitespace splitter; this tool counts 7. The Japanese 私は毎日日本語を勉強しています comes out to 1 word the same naive way and 9 here, because the text is actually segmented into words instead of left as one unbroken run of characters.

For languages that do use spaces, this tool counts by whitespace on purpose, because that is what people expect and what a word processor does: 'well-known' and 'up-to-date' are each one word here, even though Unicode's own text-segmentation algorithm would split them into two and three words respectively. A contraction like 'don't' and a decimal like '3.14' each count as one word too. A token with no letter or digit in it at all — a stray dash on its own, an ellipsis — is treated as punctuation and is not counted as a word.

Characters follow a different rule: this tool counts what a reader would point at on screen, not what a programming language reports as string length. The family emoji 👨‍👩‍👧‍👦 is 1 character here, versus 11 for a naive length check; the Brazilian flag 🇧🇷 is 1 character instead of 4, and a thumbs-up with a skin tone, 👍🏽, is 1 character too. Accented text hides the same gap: 'café' can be stored as 4 units or 5 depending on whether the é is a single code point or an e plus a separate combining accent mark, but it is 4 characters either way. Arabic with full diacritics shows it most clearly — كِتَابٌ is 4 characters but 7 Unicode code points, since every tashkeel mark attached to a letter counts as its own code point. That is exactly why the How characters are counted panel shows all three numbers side by side: if a form or database is rejecting text that looks like it should fit, the number that matters is often the code-unit count, not the one you can see.

Honest limits

There is no single correct definition of a word, and this tool would rather tell you which choices it made than pretend the question has one answer. If you count 'well-known' as two words, you are not wrong — you are just using a different rule than this page does. The same honesty applies to Chinese and Japanese: word segmentation there is statistical rather than exact, native speakers disagree about some boundaries, and the tool will occasionally split a compound that a person would have kept whole. Sentence detection has a similar edge: it uses Unicode's sentence-breaking rules plus a list of common titles so 'Meet Dr. Smith today.' reads as one sentence instead of two, and it already handles cases like '$1.50', 'e.g.' and 'U.S.' correctly — but the title list covers common abbreviations in the languages this site publishes in, not every abbreviation that exists, so an unusual one ending in a period can still get split into two sentences. It is also not a grammar or spell checker; it will not tell you if your writing is good.

Reading time and speaking time are estimates, not measurements: they assume 238 words per minute for reading and 140 for speaking, and real speed varies enormously from person to person and with how dense the material is — a page of dialogue reads much faster than a page of legal text at the same word count. You also will not find a reading-level or grade-level score here. Formulas like Flesch-Kincaid are built around counting English syllables, and applying them to Arabic or Chinese text produces a number that looks precise but means nothing; leaving it off a tool that ships in five languages is more honest than showing a score that only really works for one of them.

Why is it free?

This word counter runs entirely in your browser — every count updates locally as you type, nothing you paste is ever uploaded anywhere, and there is no account to create and no paid tier to hit a limit on. Use it as much as you want, on any text, for as long as you want.