Word and Character Counter
A full breakdown of your text: words, unique words, characters with and without spaces, lines, sentences, paragraphs and estimated reading time.
What gets counted
Character counts come in two flavours because platforms disagree about which one they mean. Characters includes every space and line break; characters without spaces strips all whitespace. Social platforms and SMS gateways generally count the first; some academic and print limits use the second. When a limit matters, check which one applies before trusting a number.
Words are counted as runs separated by whitespace, which is the same rule word processors use. Unique words counts distinct words ignoring case and punctuation, which is a quick readability signal: a low ratio of unique to total words usually means repetitive writing.
Reading and speaking time
Reading time is estimated at 225 words per minute, a widely used average for adult silent reading of general prose. Treat it as an order-of-magnitude figure: technical material with code samples reads considerably slower, and a skim reader moves much faster.
Speaking time uses 130 words per minute, roughly the pace of clear presentation delivery. It is the more useful of the two when you are timing a talk, a voiceover script or a video narration — most people over-write their first draft by a factor of two, and seeing the number early saves a painful edit later.
Sentences and paragraphs
Sentences are counted by terminal punctuation, so abbreviations such as "e.g." and "Dr." will inflate the number slightly. Paragraphs are counted as blocks separated by blank lines, which matches how plain-text and Markdown documents are structured. Both figures are best used comparatively — is this draft denser than the last one? — rather than as exact measurements.
The extraction modes
The same page also pulls specific things out of a block of text. Extract emails finds every email address and returns a deduplicated list, which is the quickest way to recover addresses from a pasted thread or a signature block. Extract URLs does the same for links. Extract numbers pulls out numeric values, including decimals and negatives, ready to paste into a spreadsheet.
Privacy note: extracting contact details from text you have a legitimate reason to process is one thing; harvesting addresses for unsolicited email is both ineffective and, in most jurisdictions, illegal. This runs locally and stores nothing, but that is a technical guarantee rather than a legal one.
Frequently asked questions
Which character count do social platforms use?
Almost all of them count every character including spaces, so use the plain characters figure. Some print and academic limits use the count without spaces, so check which one your limit refers to.
How accurate is the reading time?
It is an estimate based on 225 words per minute for silent reading. Dense technical writing reads slower and skimming is much faster, so treat it as a rough guide rather than a measurement.
Why is the sentence count slightly high?
Sentences are detected by terminal punctuation, so abbreviations such as "e.g." or "Dr." are counted as sentence endings. The figure is most useful for comparing drafts rather than as an exact count.
Does the counter update as I type?
The character and line count under the input box updates live. The full breakdown is produced when you run the tool, so that large documents do not slow down typing.