Word Counter

A word counter measures a piece of writing: how long it is, how it is broken up, and roughly how long it takes to get through.

The figures matter where a limit does. An abstract capped at 250 words, a meta description at 160 characters, a talk that has to fit fifteen minutes: each is a different measurement of the same text.

• Type or paste into the field. Every figure updates as you type, so there is nothing to press.
• Copy takes the figures as plain text. JSON and CSV download them for a spreadsheet or a script.
• The most common words list skips anything under three letters, which is what keeps a, an and of out of it, and figures such as 3.14.
• Nothing is stored between visits. Reloading the page starts from an empty field.

• Sentences are counted by their punctuation, so an abbreviation raises the number: e.g. ends one when a space follows it. The dots in 3.14 or example.com do not.
• Characters are counted as code points, so an emoji counts as one, and é counts as one whether it was typed as one character or as e and an accent. A combined emoji such as a family is several code points and still counts as several, and some systems count differently again.
• Reading and speaking times are averages applied to a word count. They say nothing about how hard the text is.
• Average characters per word ignores punctuation, so hello, counts as five rather than six.