Word Counter & Character Counter – Free, Instant, Private

How this word counter counts

A word is any run of letters or numbers separated by spaces or punctuation, so “don’t”, “e-mail”, “2026” and “café” each count as one word. Stand-alone symbols such as dashes, emoji or bullet points are not counted as words, but they do count as characters.

• Characters include everything a reader sees: letters, spaces, punctuation and emoji. An accented letter or an emoji counts as one character.
• Characters (no spaces) is the same count without spaces, tabs and line breaks – the figure some translation agencies and forms ask for.
• Sentences end with a full stop, question mark, exclamation mark or ellipsis. Paragraphs are blocks of text separated by line breaks.
• Reading time uses 238 words per minute, the average silent reading speed for adults reading English non-fiction found in a 2019 review of 190 studies (Brysbaert). Speaking time uses about 150 words per minute, a typical pace for talks and videos.

Other programs can give slightly different totals – for example, some count “e-mail” as two words. If your essay or form has a strict limit, leave a small margin.

How long should it be?

Most used words

The list shows the words you use most, ignoring very common words such as “the”, “and” and “of”. Use it to spot repetition in an essay, or to check that the main topic of an article appears naturally without being stuffed in. The percentage is that word’s share of all words in the text.

Change case

The buttons under the text box convert everything to UPPERCASE or lowercase, capitalise the first letter of each sentence (Sentence case), or capitalise each word except short words like “and” and “of” (Title Case). Check names and acronyms afterwards, because they are converted too.

Privacy

Your text is analysed in your browser. It is not sent to a server or saved, so you can safely paste private documents.

Related: Percentage Calculator · Case Converter · Password Generator