Word Count

About this tool

Paste or type text and get live counts of words, characters (with and without spaces), sentences, paragraphs and lines. Everything is calculated in your browser as you type, and nothing is uploaded. Words are groups of characters separated by whitespace. Sentences are counted by splitting on periods, question marks and exclamation marks, and paragraphs by blank lines, so the numbers are good estimates for ordinary prose rather than a linguistic analysis.

How to use it

1. Paste or type your text into the box.
2. Read the counts, which update as you type.
3. Edit the text and watch the numbers change to hit a target length.

Example

Counts for a short two-sentence text.

Hello world. This is a test.

Words: 6
Characters: 28
Characters (no spaces): 23
Sentences: 2
Paragraphs: 1
Lines: 1

Common problems

Sentence count is too high

Every period, question mark or exclamation mark ends a sentence, so abbreviations like "e.g." and decimals like 3.14 add extra sentences.

Paragraph count is lower than expected

Paragraphs are separated by a blank line. Text with only single line breaks counts as one paragraph, though each line is still counted under Lines.

Word count differs from another tool

Words are split on whitespace only, so "well-known" is one word and "word — word" with spaced dashes counts the dash as a word.