Word Counter

Students check an essay against a word limit, and applicants check a personal statement against a character limit. Writers and editors use the word count to price or pace an article. Speakers paste a script to see how long it runs: at 130 words per minute, 650 words fill five minutes. Anyone filling a form field, a meta description or a text message with a character cap can read the count with or without spaces. Copy counts puts all nine figures on the clipboard.

• Words: the text is split at spaces and line breaks, and each piece that contains a letter or digit is a word. well-known and don't each count as one; a lone dash or & counts as none. Where the browser supports word segmentation, Chinese, Japanese and Thai text is counted word by word.

• Characters: counted as grapheme clusters, the symbols a reader sees, so one emoji or one accented letter is 1. The second figure leaves out spaces, tabs and line breaks.

• Sentences (estimate): a sentence ends at a run of ., !, ? or … (or 。, ！, ？, ।, ؟, which need no space after them), plus any closing quote or bracket, when a space or the end of the text follows. The next word does not need a capital letter. The periods in Dr., e.g., initials such as J. and numbers such as 3.50 are skipped; after etc., a.m. and p.m. a sentence ends unless the next word starts in lowercase.

• Paragraphs: blocks of text separated by blank lines. With no blank line in the text, every non-empty line is a paragraph.

• Reading and speaking time: time = words ÷ 200 and time = words ÷ 130, in minutes, rounded to the second.

Example: Dr. Lee paid $3.50. Was it worth it? Yes! gives 9 words, 41 characters, 33 without spaces and 3 sentences.

The sentence count goes wrong when a sentence really ends on an initial: We chose plan B. Then we left. is counted as one sentence. The text is counted in your browser and is not uploaded. Up to 5,000,000 characters are counted.