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Word & Char Counter online
Count words, characters, sentences and paragraphs instantly
by
CHUNKY
MUNSTER
MUNSTER
Word count is the primary metric for writers, students, content marketers, and journalists. This tool goes beyond a simple count — it also breaks down character counts (with and without spaces), sentence count, paragraph count, unique words, and provides an estimated reading time based on a 200 words-per-minute average.
Words: sequences of non-whitespace characters separated by whitespace. Characters (with spaces): total code points including spaces. Characters (without spaces): excludes all whitespace. Sentences: approximated by terminal punctuation (. ! ?) with heuristics for abbreviations. Paragraphs: blocks of text separated by blank lines. Reading time: words ÷ 200 wpm (general), words ÷ 100 wpm (complex technical content).
The standard estimate for silent reading is 200–250 words per minute for general prose. Technical content with code, equations, or dense terminology is often processed at 100–150 wpm. This tool shows both estimates.
This tool splits on whitespace and counts non-empty tokens. Hyphenated words (e.g. "co-worker") count as one word. Numbers and abbreviations count as one word each. Punctuation attached to a word is stripped before counting.
A formula that uses average sentence length and average syllables per word to estimate readability. Scores range from 0 (extremely difficult) to 100 (very easy). 60–70 is appropriate for general audiences; professional and academic writing often falls in the 30–60 range.
Word splitting by whitespace works for most European languages. Languages without word spaces (Chinese, Japanese, Thai) cannot be counted correctly by whitespace splitting — character count is more meaningful for those.
See also the Character Counter, Word Frequency tool, and the Typing Speed Test.