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Word and character counter
Type or paste into the box and the numbers update as you go. Or drop a file — a PDF, a text file, Markdown — and it is read on your own machine and counted, which is the part most counters cannot do without uploading your document first.
- Words
- 0
- Characters
- 0
- Without spaces
- 0
- Sentences
- 0
- Paragraphs
- 0
- Reading time
- 0
Your browser lacks the Unicode segmentation this counter prefers, so emoji and languages written without spaces are approximate here.
Where it runs
A document is read in the browser. Nothing is uploaded.
No queue, no account
It starts the moment you drop the file, and it never asks who you are.
No watermark
What comes out is the file you made, with nothing added to it.
How it works
- Type or paste your text into the box, or drop a document onto it.
- The counts update as you type: words, characters with and without spaces, sentences, paragraphs and reading time.
- Compare against a limit if you have one — the common ones are listed beside the count.
- Nothing is sent anywhere at any point, and nothing is kept once you close the tab.
Why counters disagree with each other
Paste the same paragraph into three counters and you will often get three answers, and the disagreements are not random. Characters are the usual culprit: most tools count what a computer stores rather than what a person sees, and by that measure a single emoji is two characters, a flag is four, and a family emoji is eight. If you are trimming a post to fit a limit, that difference decides whether you have to cut a word.
This one counts what your backspace key would delete — the unit Unicode calls a grapheme cluster, which is what anybody means by a character. It also handles languages that do not put spaces between words: Chinese, Japanese and Thai are broken into words properly rather than reported as one enormous word, or as however many line breaks they happen to contain.
Sentences are the honest exception. They are found by looking for full stops, question marks and exclamation marks, which reads a sentence beginning with an abbreviated title as two. No general fix exists short of parsing the language, so the number is offered as an estimate and labelled as one.
Counting a file, not just text you can paste
Most counters give you a box. That is fine for a paragraph and useless for a forty-page report, and the ones that do accept a file almost always upload it — which for a dissertation, a manuscript or a client document is a poor trade for a number.
Here the file is read where it already is. A PDF has its text extracted in your browser, exactly as the PDF-to-text converter does, and plain text, Markdown, CSV and HTML are read directly. Nothing leaves the device at any point.
One limit worth knowing before you try: a scanned PDF contains no text at all, only a picture of one. There is nothing to count, and you will be told that rather than shown a zero and left to wonder.
Reading time, and what it is worth
The reading time assumes 200 words per minute, the figure most publishing tools use for adult prose. It is a reasonable average and a poor prediction for any particular person or text — technical writing is read far more slowly, and a practised reader goes much faster.
Treat it as a rough sense of length rather than a measurement. It is useful for telling a five-minute read from a twenty-minute one, and not for anything finer than that.
Word and character counter: common questions
Is my text or document uploaded?
No. Typing, pasting and dropping a PDF, text file, Markdown, CSV or HTML are all read and counted inside your browser, and nothing is transmitted. You can disconnect from the network and the counter still works.
Why does your character count differ from another tool?
Almost always emoji or accented characters. Most counters count storage units rather than characters, so one emoji comes out as two and a family emoji as eight. This one counts what your backspace key deletes, which is what a person means by a character and usually what a platform limit means too.
Does it count words in Chinese, Japanese or Thai?
Yes. Those languages do not separate words with spaces, so a counter that splits on spaces reports a whole paragraph as a single word. This one uses the Unicode word-breaking rules your browser already ships, which handle them correctly.
Can I count the words in a PDF?
Yes, and it happens on your own machine — the text is extracted from the file in your browser and counted there. A scan is the exception: it holds a picture of a page rather than text, so there is nothing to count, and the page tells you that instead of showing a zero.
How accurate is the sentence count?
It is an estimate and is labelled as one. Sentences are found by looking for full stops, question marks and exclamation marks, so an abbreviation followed by a full stop is counted as the end of a sentence. Fixing that in general requires parsing the language, which is a different kind of tool entirely.
Is there a length limit, or a cost?
Neither, and no account. Because nothing is uploaded there is no capacity to ration, so the practical ceiling is your own memory — and text is small enough that you are unlikely ever to find it.