Word counter

This word counter gives the number of words in your text as soon as you paste or type it into the box above: the total shows in large type on the right, with characters with and without spaces, sentences, paragraphs and reading time. A concrete example: "I don't think it's ready. The cat's toy cost £12.50, didn't it? Yes." counts 13 words and 3 sentences, because contractions such as "don't" and "it's" are single words and "12.50" is one number. A 500-word cover letter takes about 2 minutes 6 seconds to read silently at 238 words per minute. Type your limit (250, 500, 1,000 words) in the field provided to see how many words you have left. Everything is counted in your browser and nothing is uploaded. The main limit is edge cases, hyphens and numbers written with spaces, which Word or Google Docs may count differently: a few words of difference per page is normal.

A word here is a run of letters or digits, in the spirit of the Unicode word boundary rules (annex UAX #29). Spaces and punctuation separate words; a lone sign such as a dash, a colon, an exclamation mark, a quote mark or an emoji does not count. Three signs do not split a word when they sit between two letters: the apostrophe, straight or curly, the hyphen and the non-breaking hyphen. So "don't", "o'clock", "well-known" and "mother-in-law" are one word each. A comma or a full stop inside a number does not split it either, and nor does the thin space the French use for thousands: "1 234,5" stays one word.

Sentences end with a full stop, an exclamation mark, a question mark, an ellipsis or a line break, except after a common abbreviation (Mr., Mrs., Dr., e.g., i.e., vs.) or an initial. A paragraph is any line holding at least one word. If you write in French as well, switch the text language to French: a second total then counts elisions such as l' or qu' as separate words, the way some French teachers do.

What about Word and Google Docs? Their help pages explain where to find the count (the status bar in Word, the Tools menu in Google Docs) but not how they handle hyphens or numbers with spaces. The only documented detail is that Google Docs leaves headers, footers and footnotes out. For an exact number of characters, use the character counter with and without spaces.

Reading time divides the word count by an average speed. The figures come from Marc Brysbaert's 2019 review in the Journal of Memory and Language, which pooled 190 studies of silent reading. For English it gives an average of 238 words per minute for non-fiction (260 for fiction, with most adults between 175 and 300) and 183 words per minute when reading aloud. For a French text, choose French above the box: the speeds drop to 214 and 180 words per minute, the French values in the same review.

These are averages, not promises. A technical text full of figures reads more slowly, a simple story faster. For a speech, a job interview presentation or a viva, the aloud time is a minimum: pauses, breaths and slides come on top. Rehearse once with an online stopwatch to learn your own pace.

Word limits are everywhere: a 300-word personal statement, a 500-word cover letter for a French employer, a 250-word abstract for a master's thesis at a French university, an 800-word article. Check what the brief includes: titles, footnotes, quotations, references and appendices are often left out of the count, so paste only the part that counts.

To cut words, the list of most frequent words shows repetitions, and the average words per sentence flags sentences that read better split in two. To lengthen a short text, develop an example rather than padding it. If an online form counts words itself, its counter is the one that matters: keep a small margin.

• Unicode Consortium, UAX #29: Unicode Text Segmentation, page read on 27 October 2026.
• Microsoft Support, Show word count, page read on 27 October 2026.
• Google Docs Editors Help, Count the words in a document, page read on 27 October 2026.
• Journal of Memory and Language, Marc Brysbaert, How many words do we read per minute? A review and meta-analysis of reading rate (2019), page read on 27 October 2026.

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