Word counter

A word counter tracks the size and shape of a piece of text: words, characters (with and without spaces), sentences, paragraphs, lines, and an estimated reading time. Type or paste text into the box, and every number updates as you go.

How does it count words in languages without spaces?

Splitting text into words sounds simple until you hit a language like Japanese or Chinese, which doesn’t put spaces between words at all. This tool avoids the naive approach of counting whitespace-separated chunks and instead uses Intl.Segmenter, a Unicode-aware text-segmentation API built into the browser, to find real word and sentence boundaries. Sentence counting works the same way, using the segmenter’s sentence mode rather than just splitting on periods, which also avoids miscounting things like “Dr.” or “3.14” as sentence breaks.

Characters are counted as Unicode code points rather than raw string length, so a single emoji or an accented character built from multiple code units still counts as one character, matching what you’d count by eye. Paragraphs are blocks of text separated by one or more blank lines, and reading time is estimated at 200 words per minute, a commonly used average for adult silent reading.

Is my text uploaded anywhere?

No. Counting happens entirely in your browser using built-in JavaScript APIs, and the text you type or paste never leaves your machine. That matters for a draft you haven’t shared yet, a message you’re still deciding whether to send, or anything else you’d rather keep off a server. See MDN’s Intl.Segmenter reference for how the underlying word and sentence detection works.

What is this useful for?

Keeping an essay or cover letter under a word limit, checking how long a blog post will take to read, or getting a quick sense of how dense a paragraph is before you trim it down. It also helps when a platform enforces a character limit, like a social media post or a meta description, since the character count updates live as you edit.