Word Counter

What this tool does

A word counter answers “how long is this text” with several related numbers, not one magic length. This word counter shows words, characters including spaces, characters with whitespace removed, sentences, and paragraphs. The counts update as you type. The text stays in this browser. Nothing is uploaded.

Those five numbers are useful together and easy to misuse one at a time. An essay limit is usually a word count. A form field is usually a character count. A reading-time guess is neither of those, and this page does not invent one. Sentence and paragraph counts help you see whether a draft is one block of text or several claims. They are practical splits, not grammar analysis.

Use this page for a school word limit, a blog draft, or a caption you want to keep short. If the question is “will this fit in 160 or 280 characters,” including Unicode and UTF-8 bytes, use the Character Counter. That page is built around length and an optional limit. This one is built around writing stats.

How to use

1. Paste or type the text. The counts update immediately.
2. Read the five rows. Empty text is all zeros, not an error.
3. Example loads a two-sentence, two-paragraph sample so you can see every row move. Clear empties the box.

There is no Calculate button because the job is a live count. Keyboard users can tab into the box and type. Labels sit above the field. The result rows use text, not HTML injection, so a pasted script tag is counted as characters and never run.

Example

The Example text is two sentences, then a blank line, then a third sentence. That is 12 words, 69 characters including spaces, 57 characters without whitespace, 3 sentences, and 2 paragraphs. Change “Hello world.” to “Hello world” without the period and the sentence count drops, because this page treats a sentence as a span that ends with ., ?, or !.

Hello world. This is a second sentence.

A new paragraph starts here!

Limits

• A word is a run of non-whitespace. Contractions and hyphenated tokens count as one word each. “don’t” is one. “well-known” is one.
• Characters are the JavaScript string length: UTF-16 code units. An emoji can use two units. The Character Counter shows Unicode characters and UTF-8 bytes separately.
• Characters (no spaces) remove every whitespace character, including tabs and line breaks, not only the space bar.
• Sentences split after ., ?, or !. Abbreviations such as “Mr.” or “e.g.” can create a false split. Unusual punctuation can merge two sentences. This is not NLP.
• A paragraph is a block separated by a blank line. A single newline inside a stanza is still one paragraph.
• Input over 200,000 characters is refused so the tab does not freeze. Split the file if you need a larger count.

HTML and script-looking text are treated as ordinary characters. The page never executes markup you paste. Quotes, accents, and other Unicode stay as typed. The count is not a readability score, a plagiarism check, or a publisher’s official word count if their house style hyphenates differently.

If you only needed “how many letters remain in this field,” switch to the Character Counter. If you need to change the text, not measure it, the Case Converter, Find and Replace, and Whitespace Cleaner sit in the same Text Tools group.