Word Counter

Checked 15 October 2026. What was checked. How these pages are maintained.

How the counts work

Words are chunks of letters and numbers split on spaces. Characters are counted with and without spaces. Sentences split on . ! ? Reading time assumes about 200 words per minute. Nothing is uploaded. The text stays in your browser.

Worked example

A 500-word page at 200 words per minute is about 2.5 minutes of reading. “Don’t” counts as one word. A hyphenated name may count as one or two depending on the spaces.

Nothing is uploaded. The text never leaves this browser tab. This is not a grammar or plagiarism checker.

What this page calls a word

Words are the pieces left after the text is split on whitespace. “Please send the receipt by Friday.” is 6 words. “Don’t” is one word, because the apostrophe is not a space. A hyphenated name with no spaces is one word. The same name with a space is two. Characters are the length of the whole box, including spaces and line breaks. Characters without spaces strip every whitespace character and count what remains. Sentences are counted by the marks . ! and ? so “Dr. Singh arrived.” can look like two sentences. The counter is not a grammar checker and will not fix that.

Reading time is words ÷ 200, labelled in minutes. Six words is 0.0 minutes at one decimal. A 500-word note is 2.5 minutes. The 200 is a common silent-reading guess for adult prose. A technical paragraph full of numbers takes longer. A text message takes less. Change your expectation. The page will not change the 200.

The text stays in the tab

Nothing is uploaded. There is no account, and closing the tab drops the text. Do not use it as a place to store a draft. It also will not score keyword density, detect plagiarism, or tell you whether a sentence is too long. Those are different products. If you are checking a figure from another Everyday Fig page, the words are not the check. The arithmetic under that calculator is the check. This tool only counts.

A paragraph you can count by hand

The sentence “A 500-word page at 200 words per minute is about 2.5 minutes of reading.” is 14 words. Count them on your fingers if you want the definition to be obvious: A, 500-word, page, at, 200, words, per, minute, is, about, 2.5, minutes, of, reading. The token “500-word” is one, because the hyphen is not a space. “2.5” is one. A line break does not create a word unless there is whitespace, and a line break is whitespace, so a word split across two lines by a break becomes two words. Pasting from a PDF sometimes inserts a break in the middle of a word. If the count looks high, look for those breaks before you trust the number. Characters include the period at the end. Sentences here are 1, because there is one period.

Common questions