Boring Tools

Word & Character Counter

Open tool

Count words, characters, sentences, and paragraphs.

Paste or type text and see, live, how many words, characters, sentences and paragraphs it contains, plus an estimate of the reading time. Useful for essays with a word limit, social posts with a character limit, and general editing.

How it works

The counts update on every keystroke; there is no button to press. Each figure is worked out from the text like this:

Words are runs of characters separated by spaces, tabs or line breaks. Characters is the length of the text, counting spaces and line breaks. Characters (no spaces) removes every space, tab and line break before counting. Sentences counts stretches of text ended by ., ! or ? (a run like ?! or ... counts once), plus any trailing text with no closing mark. Paragraphs counts the non-empty lines — any line break starts a new paragraph, so a blank line between them is not required. Reading time assumes 200 words per minute, rounded up.

How to use it

  1. Click the big text box and paste or type your text.
  2. Read the six figures beside it (or below it on a phone).
  3. Edit the text and watch the numbers change.

Options & controls

Controls

Text box
Where you enter the text. There is no size limit other than what your browser can handle.
Reset
In the title row. Clears the text, which sets every count back to zero.

Reading the results

The six figures

Words
Number of whitespace-separated words. A hyphenated word (well-known) or a contraction (don't) counts as one.
Characters
Every character including spaces and line breaks. Some emoji and rare symbols count as two, because they take two units in the browser's text encoding.
Characters (no spaces)
As above, with all spaces, tabs and line breaks removed. This is the count many forms use.
Sentences
Stretches of text ending in a full stop, exclamation mark or question mark. Abbreviations such as Dr. and decimal numbers such as 3.14 can each be counted as a sentence end, so treat the figure as an estimate.
Paragraphs
Non-empty lines. Each line break begins a new paragraph.
Reading time
Words divided by 200, rounded up to whole minutes and shown as ~N min (at least 1 minute once there is text; 0 min when empty). Silent reading speed varies a lot between people.

Tips & guidelines

  • When a limit is quoted in characters, check whether it counts spaces. Use Characters for “with spaces” limits and Characters (no spaces) for the other kind.
  • Different programs count words slightly differently (for example, how they treat dashes or numbers). If you are near a strict limit, leave a small margin.
  • Leading and trailing blank space does not count towards words, sentences or paragraphs, but it does count towards Characters.

Limits

  • Sentence detection is simple and English-oriented. Text in languages that do not use . ! ? as sentence ends will show unreliable sentence counts.
  • Languages written without spaces between words (such as Chinese or Japanese) will count each unbroken run of text as one word.
  • There is no file upload, keyword-density report, or copy button; this tool only counts.

Saved in your browser

Nothing. The text exists only on the page and is gone when you refresh.

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