About the Word Counter
Paste text and get a live count of words, characters with and without spaces, sentences, and paragraphs. It also applies Title Case, Sentence case, UPPERCASE, and lowercase transformations, each of which can be toggled back off to restore your original text.
Everything runs in the browser as you type. Nothing is uploaded, which makes it usable for a draft you would rather not paste into a random website - an unpublished article, a cover letter, a client brief.
How to use this tool
- Type or paste your text into the box. All five counts update immediately.
- Tick a case option to transform the text in place.
- Untick the same option to restore what you had before the transformation.
- Read the statistics table below the input for the full breakdown.
Which count you actually need
Different contexts measure different things, and the mismatch causes real problems. Academic and publishing work is almost always specified in words. Social platforms and SMS count characters - and the limit is usually characters including spaces, which is why the two character counts here are separate.
Meta descriptions and page titles are the awkward case: search engines truncate by rendered pixel width, not character count, so a title full of capital Ws gets cut sooner than one full of lowercase i's. Character count is a usable proxy - around 60 for a title, 155 for a description - but treat it as an estimate rather than a rule.
For speaking, plan on roughly 130 to 150 words per minute of comfortable delivery. A ten-minute conference talk is about 1,300 to 1,500 words of script.
How these counts are calculated
Words are runs of characters separated by whitespace. This is the same definition most word processors use, and it means a hyphenated compound counts as one word while an em-dash flanked by spaces does not add one.
Sentences are counted by terminal punctuation - periods, question marks, exclamation marks. Abbreviations like `e.g.` and `Ph.D.` will inflate the count slightly, which is a limitation of every simple sentence counter. Paragraphs are counted by line breaks, so a single hard-wrapped block of text may register as several paragraphs.
Reading the numbers as a writing signal
Words divided by sentences gives average sentence length, and it is the most useful derived number here. Above roughly 25 words per sentence, prose starts to feel heavy regardless of how well constructed it is; consistently below about 10 and it can read as clipped. Most clear non-fiction sits between 15 and 20, with deliberate variation.
Characters divided by words gives average word length, a rough proxy for register. Above about six, you are probably leaning on abstract or technical vocabulary - sometimes exactly right, sometimes a sign that a simpler word would do the same work.
Frequently asked questions
- Is my text uploaded anywhere?
- No. The counting runs in your browser and the text is never transmitted. Close the tab and it is gone.
- Why does the sentence count look wrong?
- Abbreviations and decimals containing periods each register as a sentence ending. Text with many of them will read high. There is no reliable way to fix this without full language parsing.
- Does the case transformation lose my original text?
- No. Unticking the option you applied restores the text as it was. Applying a second transformation on top of the first does become the new baseline, though, so untick before switching.
- Why does Title Case capitalise words like 'of' and 'the'?
- The transformation capitalises the first letter of every word rather than implementing a style guide. Most title-case conventions leave short articles, conjunctions, and prepositions lowercase unless they open the title, so expect to correct a few by hand.