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Paste or type any text and watch the numbers update as you go — words, characters, sentences, paragraphs, reading time, speaking time and even your longest word. It's the counter to reach for when an essay has a hard limit, a post is running long, or a speech has to fit inside five minutes.
A plain word count is only half the story. This counter shows seven live statistics at once: words, characters, characters without spaces, sentences, paragraphs, estimated reading time, estimated speaking time, and the longest word in your text. Each one answers a different question. Characters matter when a form, a tweet or a meta description cuts you off at a fixed length. Reading time tells a blogger how long a post will hold a visitor. Speaking time — calculated at a slower 130 words per minute, because talking is slower than reading — is the one presenters and video creators actually need.
Who uses it most? Students working to limits like 500, 1,500 or 3,000 words (and the dreaded "±10%" that lecturers allow). Freelance writers and translators who bill per word and need a number both sides can trust. Job seekers squeezing a cover letter onto one page. Social media managers checking a post before it gets truncated. And speakers of every kind — teachers, students defending a thesis, anyone recording a voiceover — who plan in minutes, not words.
Say you've written a scholarship essay and the limit is 1,200 words. You paste your draft and the counter reports 1,247 words, 7,480 characters, 52 sentences, a 6-minute reading time and a 10-minute speaking time.
Two useful things jump out. First, you're 47 words over — about four average sentences to cut. Second, 1,247 words across 52 sentences means roughly 24 words per sentence, which reads a little heavy; splitting the longest sentences makes the essay feel lighter without changing its length. Ten minutes later you've trimmed the filler, the counter shows 1,196 words, and you're inside the limit with room to spare.
Any run of characters separated by spaces counts as one word — so "well-known" is one word, "2026" is one word, and so is a stray link. It's the same simple rule most editors and teachers apply, which is why the total matches what people expect.
Reading time assumes an average adult silent reading speed of 200 words per minute. Speaking time uses 130 words per minute — a natural, clear pace for presentations and voiceovers. A 650-word script is therefore about 5 minutes spoken aloud.
No. The counting happens in your browser with JavaScript the moment you type. Close the tab and the text is gone — nothing is transmitted to or kept on a server.
Word processors may also count words in text boxes, headers, footnotes and endnotes, and they treat some hyphenated phrases and symbols differently. Differences of a few words on a long document are normal; for a strict limit, leave yourself a small safety margin.
There's no set limit. Book-length texts still count instantly, though on a very old phone a huge paste might take a moment to process.
Yes — watch the Characters figure. For example, a standard post on X allows 280 characters; the counter updates live so you can trim before you post instead of after.