Word Counter
Paste or type your text — get live counts of words, characters, sentences and paragraphs, plus reading time.
Why count words at all?
Word counts quietly run a lot of the internet. Blog posts under 300 words rarely rank on Google; most SEO guides suggest 1,000+ for competitive topics. Social platforms have hard character limits — X gives you 280 characters, meta descriptions get cut around 160. Freelance writers get paid per word. University essays have minimums. Knowing your count as you type saves endless recounting.
Reading time matters too. Visitors decide in seconds whether an article is worth their time, and "5 min read" labels (like the one this tool calculates at ~200 words per minute) set honest expectations. Product pages with 50 words convert differently than ones with 300 — now you can measure instead of guess.
This counter updates live with every keystroke and handles the edge cases: extra spaces, line breaks and pasted formatting don't inflate the numbers. Sentence detection looks for real sentence endings, and paragraph counting ignores blank lines. Everything stays in your browser — your draft is never uploaded anywhere, which matters if you're working on something unpublished.