Word Counter
Count words, characters, sentences, and paragraphs live as you type, alongside unique words, average word and sentence length, estimated reading time, and a word-density breakdown of your draft. Words are split on whitespace, the way Word and Google Docs count against a limit, and every figure is computed on your device — nothing is uploaded, and it keeps working offline.
How Word Counter works
Type or paste your draft into the editor.
Counts recalculate on every keystroke — no button to press.
Open Word density to see which terms you lean on most.
Copy or download the text when you are done.
When to use Word Counter
- Editing an essay, personal statement, or grant answer down to a hard word ceiling, watching the Words tile fall as you cut.
- Confirming a blog post or article clears an editor’s minimum length — say 800 or 1,500 words — before you file it.
- Reading the “Avg. sentence length” row to catch a draft that has drifted into long, dense sentences and needs breaking up.
- Opening the Word density panel to see whether a single term, brand name, or filler word is repeated more than you meant.
- Re-checking a section total after you delete a passage, instead of highlighting the paragraph and reading Word’s status bar.
- Sanity-checking a word count someone else quoted — pasting the same text here to see whether their counter split hyphens and contractions the way yours does.
- Estimating how long a piece takes to read from the Reading time panel, so a “6 min read” label is grounded in the actual word count.
- Spotting the single longest token in a draft from the Longest word panel, which usually surfaces an accidental run-on with no spaces or a stray URL.
Examples
Input
The harbour emptied at dusk. Gulls settled on the pilings, and the last ferry pushed off without a sound.
Output
19 words and 105 characters (87 without spaces), across 2 sentences and 1 paragraph. Average word length reads 4.6 characters and average sentence length 9.5 words. At 225 words per minute the Reading time panel shows “< 1 min”, with an aloud estimate near the same, and the density panel puts “the” at the top with two occurrences.
9.5 words per sentence sits comfortably inside the range that reads easily on screen.
Input
This is a state-of-the-art result, and it doesn’t disappoint.
Output
8 words, not eleven or twelve. Because tokens are split only on whitespace, “state-of-the-art” is one word and “doesn’t” is one word — the same way Google Docs and Word tally them against a limit.
If you expected 11, you were counting the hyphen-joined parts separately; word limits almost never do.
Input
Cat, cat, CAT. A cat sat.
Output
6 words total but only 4 unique: “cat” collapses to a single entry once case is lowered and the surrounding comma and full stop are stripped, joining “a” and “sat”. The three sentences are detected from the full stops after “CAT”, “A” is folded into the same run, and “sat”.
Unique-word counting is for spotting repetition, not for a scored vocabulary metric.
Input
A 480-word opening section you are trying to push over a 500-word minimum.
Output
The Words tile reads 480, so you are 20 short. Add two sentences and it ticks to roughly 505 with no button to press — the count recomputes on every keystroke on your device.
There is no recount step; the figure is always current with what is in the editor.
How Word Counter works under the hood
A word is any run of non-whitespace text. The counter trims the document, splits on any stretch of spaces, tabs, or line breaks, and drops empty fragments. That single rule is why “state-of-the-art” and “doesn’t” each count as one word — there is no attempt to break on hyphens, slashes, or apostrophes, which keeps the total aligned with the limit-counters in Word and Google Docs.
Characters come in two forms. The Characters figure is the raw length of the text in UTF-16 code units, matching what most forms and databases mean by “length”. Characters without spaces removes every whitespace character first, so the gap between the two numbers is exactly the whitespace in your draft.
Unique words are counted after normalising each token: it is lower-cased, and leading and trailing characters that are neither letters nor digits are stripped. So “Cat,” and “cat” fold into one entry, while an internal apostrophe or hyphen is preserved, keeping “doesn’t” distinct from “doesnt”.
Average word length is the mean of the raw token lengths, including any internal punctuation such as the apostrophe in a contraction. Average sentence length is total words divided by the number of sentences, so it moves with both counts as you edit and reads “—” until there is at least one sentence.
Reading time divides the word count by 225 words per minute — a typical adult silent-reading pace for online prose — and rounds to the nearest second, showing “< 1 min” for anything under sixty seconds. The panel also gives an aloud figure at 140 words per minute. Both come from the word count alone, so tables, code, and figures take longer than the number implies.
Sentences and paragraphs feed the secondary stats. Sentences break on a full stop, question mark, or exclamation mark followed by whitespace, with guards for abbreviations and decimals; paragraphs split on a blank line. The Longest word panel simply reports the longest single token, which is a fast way to catch a pasted URL or an accidentally un-spaced run.
Common mistakes
- Expecting hyphenated or slash-joined phrases to count as several words. “Mother-in-law” is one word here and in every limit-counter that matters; if a style guide counts it as three, that is a manual convention, not what an automated word count reports.
- Reading the Characters figure as “what a reader sees”. For plain English they line up, but emoji and some accented letters occupy more than one code unit, so the raw character count can exceed the visible count. When a limit is quoted in visible characters, use the Character Counter, whose meter measures graphemes.
- Treating reading time as exact. It is a word-count estimate at a fixed pace, so a dense technical piece or one full of code blocks will always take longer in practice than the panel suggests. Use it to compare drafts, not to promise a precise duration.
- Assuming unique words is a richness or plagiarism score. It is a raw count of distinct normalised tokens — useful for noticing that one word repeats — and says nothing about how varied or original the writing is.
- Pasting formatted text and expecting the count to change. The editor holds plain text, so bold, italics, and headings from a rich source do not affect the total; only the words themselves are counted.
- Worrying that a very long document will slow the page or be sent somewhere. Counting runs on your device on every keystroke and handles documents in the hundreds of thousands of characters; nothing is uploaded.