Word Counter
Type or paste your text below for instant word count, reading time, and more.
Case Converter
Find & Replace
Top 10 Words
How to use
- Type or paste your text into the large textarea above.
- Stats update automatically — no button needed.
- Use Case Converter buttons to transform your text formatting.
- Use Find & Replace to swap words or phrases in bulk.
- Top 10 Words shows the most frequent words, excluding common stop words.
- Reading time is estimated at 238 words per minute; speaking time at 130 wpm.
About this Word Counter
Word count requirements vary more than people expect — a college essay prompt might specify "500 words," X/Twitter caps at 280 characters, and a resume bullet reads best under 20 words per line. This tool tracks words and characters simultaneously, with reading time calculated at 238 words/minute (the commonly cited adult silent-reading average) and speaking time at 130 words/minute, closer to natural unrushed speech — useful for timing a script, not just checking length.
Exactly how this counts, in detail
- Words are anything separated by whitespace — a hyphenated word like "well-known" or a contraction like "don't" counts as one word each, since neither a hyphen nor an apostrophe splits it. An em dash with no spaces around it won't split a word either.
- Characters (with spaces) is the raw text length, including line breaks. Characters (no spaces) strips all whitespace — spaces, tabs, and line breaks alike, not just spaces.
- Sentences are counted by looking for runs of text ending in ./!/?, with no abbreviation detection — "Mr. Smith went home." counts as 2 sentences, not 1, because "Mr." itself ends in a period. Keep this in mind if your text has a lot of abbreviations, initials, or decimal numbers.
- Paragraphs require a fully blank line to separate them — a single line break within a block of text does not start a new paragraph count.
- Top 10 Words strips digits and punctuation before ranking, and excludes a fixed list of common English stop words (the, and, of, etc.) — so numbers never appear in this list even if they're in your text, and very short words (1 character after stripping) are excluded too.
This counts text the way described above, which won't always match another editor exactly — Microsoft Word and Google Docs use their own counting rules (for example, different sentence-boundary and hyphenation handling) and this tool has not been tested against either for exact parity, so treat small differences between tools as expected rather than a bug in one or the other.