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Word Counter
LiveLive counts of words, characters with and without spaces, sentences, paragraphs, reading and speaking time, plus a writing timer. All in your browser.
0
Words
0
Characters
0
No spaces
0
Sentences
0
Paragraphs
0 sec
Reading time
Speaking time about 0 sec. Everything stays in your browser.
Timer
0:000 wordswpm after 10s
What it does
- Live counts while you edit
- Characters counted with and without spaces
- Words, sentences, paragraphs, reading and speaking time
- A writing timer: count up or down, with words added and words per minute
Your files
It never leaves your device.
This one runs entirely in your browser. Nothing you type or drop here is sent to us, so there is nothing on our server to keep, and nothing to delete. It works offline once the page has loaded.
How to count words with a timer
Paste or type your text
The six tiles recount on every keystroke: words, characters, characters without spaces, sentences, paragraphs and reading time. Speaking time sits on the line under the box. You do not need the timer for any of that.
Choose a timer length
Count up runs with no end, like a stopwatch. 5 min, 10 min, 15 min and 30 min count down instead. The length is locked once the timer has started, and reset unlocks it.
Press Start and write
The clock runs and the numbers with it show the words added since you pressed Start, which is the count now minus the count then, so text already in the box does not count and deleting words takes them off. Words per minute appears after the first 10 seconds, because before that one word reads as a burst of speed. Pause freezes the clock and the numbers, and anything you type while paused is left out when you resume.
Read your result
A countdown stops itself at 0:00 and says Time is up, with the word count and words per minute frozen at that moment. The box stays editable and nothing is cleared, so you can keep writing or copy the text out. Reset clears the timer and unlocks the length, and the next Start measures a new session from whatever is in the box then.
Frequently asked questions
What counts as a word, and does it work for Chinese or Japanese?
A word is a run of characters with whitespace on either side. So state-of-the-art is one word, don't is one word, and 3.5 is one word, while a slash with spaces around it counts as a word of its own. Any kind of whitespace separates, including the non-breaking spaces that come along with text pasted out of Word or a web page, which is why a pasted paragraph does not read here as one enormous word. The limit of that rule is languages which do not put spaces between words: a Chinese, Japanese or Thai sentence arrives as one unbroken run and is counted as one word. No counter that splits on spaces can do better. Use the character count for those.
What is the difference between the Characters and No spaces counts?
There are two character tiles and they answer different questions. Characters counts every unit of text as stored, including every space, tab and line break. No spaces strips out all whitespace before counting, not just the space bar: tabs and line breaks come out too, so a four word line broken across a tab and a newline reads 7 characters and 4 without spaces. One more thing catches people out: whitespace at the very end of the box is counted as characters but not as words, so pasting text with three trailing spaces reads 2 words and 14 characters. Emoji are the other surprise. Text is measured in UTF-16 code units, and most emoji are stored as a pair, so a single smiling face reads as 2 characters and a flag, built from two regional indicator symbols, reads as 4. Accented Latin letters and Chinese characters are stored as one unit each and count as 1. That is the same arithmetic most social platforms and form limits use, so it is usually the number you want, but check which of the two counts your limit actually means.
Why is the sentence count sometimes wrong?
It counts a full stop, question mark, exclamation mark or ellipsis that is followed by a space or by the end of the text, and there is no way to do that perfectly without understanding the writing. Two cases give a wrong answer. An abbreviation is read as an ending, so Mr. Smith went home. counts as 2 rather than 1. And a full stop tucked inside a closing quotation mark is not followed by a space, so it is missed. Decimal points are safe, because a digit is not a space. Treat the number as a good estimate of length rather than a fact.
Why does pressing Enter not add a paragraph?
A paragraph here means a block of text with a blank line above and below it, which is how a plain text file marks one. One press of Enter is a line break inside the same paragraph, so three lines typed that way count as 1 paragraph; press it twice and you get 2. Any run of blank lines counts as one break, including lines that hold only spaces, so a heavily spaced document does not inflate the number.
How are the reading and speaking times worked out?
The word count divided by a fixed rate: 200 words per minute for reading and 130 for speaking aloud. So a 200 word passage reads as 1 min and speaks as 1 min 32 sec, and you can check that against the box. Reading time is one of the six tiles; speaking time sits on the line just under the text area rather than in the grid. Both rates are the usual published averages for adult silent reading and unhurried speech. They are not measured on your text and cannot be, because nothing here knows how dense the writing is or how well you know the subject. Technical writing runs slower and light prose runs faster, so read them as a rough bracket. For a talk you have to fit into a slot, time yourself reading a paragraph and scale from that instead.
Is my text sent to your server?
No. The counting runs in your browser, in code the page has already downloaded, and it recounts on every keystroke without touching the network. There is nothing on our server to keep and nothing to delete. Once the page has loaded you can disconnect entirely and it still works, which is the part worth testing yourself if the text is confidential. The writing timer is the same: it runs on your device's clock and sends nothing. The page does tell us once per visit that the word counter was used, which is how the counter on this page is kept, and that request carries no body, so none of your text goes with it.