Free Word Counter

Type or paste, and the counts update immediately: words, characters with and without spaces, sentences, and paragraphs. Nothing is uploaded — the whole calculation runs in your browser, so it works offline and your draft never leaves your device.

Reading time and speaking time are different numbers

Reading time here uses 200 words per minute, the conservative end of the usual 200 to 250 range for adult silent reading. Speaking time uses 130, because people talk far more slowly than they read. If you are timing a talk, a video script or a voiceover, the speaking figure is the one you want — using the reading estimate is why scripts routinely run long.

Both are shown in minutes and seconds rather than rounded up to the nearest minute. A 40-second read is not "1 minute", and rounding it hides exactly the detail you were checking.

Against the limits you are actually writing for

Most people counting characters are writing against a specific ceiling: 160 for a meta description, 60 for a title tag, 280 for a post on X. Rather than make you remember them, the tool shows your current length against each and marks the ones you have gone past.

How we count

A word is any run of characters separated by whitespace that contains a letter or a number, so hyphenated words count once and stray punctuation does not inflate the total. Sentences are split on terminal punctuation with common abbreviations accounted for, so "Dr. Smith" and "3.5 million" do not each get counted as two sentences. Paragraphs are blocks separated by a blank line.