Count words, characters and reading time as you type

No. Every count is worked out by JavaScript running in your browser, and the page makes no network request with your text. Nothing is written to storage either, so the box is empty again when you come back. To keep the figures, press Copy stats and paste them wherever you like.

The text is split with your browser's Unicode word segmenter, so Hindi, Arabic, accented and other non-Latin text count correctly. A hyphenated word such as well-known counts as one, a contraction such as don't counts as one, and a number such as 1,000.50 counts as a word. Punctuation, symbols and emoji are not words. So The 3-point plan costs 1,000.50 rupees, or 25% of 2026's budget. is 11 words. Unique words ignore capitalisation: The and the are the same word.

Characters are Unicode code points, so an emoji or an accented letter counts once; spaces and line breaks are characters too, which is why there is a second figure without spaces. A sentence ends at a full stop, question mark or exclamation mark (or the Devanagari danda and the Arabic question mark) followed by a space and anything other than a lowercase letter, or at a line break. So e.g. this stays in one sentence, while Mr. Smith is counted as two. A paragraph is a block of text separated from the next by a blank line. Lines are counted the way a text editor numbers them, blank lines included.

Reading time divides the word count by 230 words per minute, the pace used for the reading times on this site's blog. Speaking time divides it by 150 words per minute, a comfortable pace for a talk or a voice-over. Both are rounded to the nearest second. 575 words take 2 min 30 sec to read and 3 min 50 sec to say aloud; 1,000 words take 4 min 21 sec and 6 min 40 sec.

Keyword density is how often a word appears as a share of all the words in the text: a word used 31 times in 575 words has a density of 5.39%. The table lists the ten most used words. Function words such as the, and, of and it's, from a list of 178 common English words, are left out so that the words that carry your meaning rise to the top. Tick Include stop words to count them as well.