Word Counter
Live word, character, sentence, and paragraph counts with reading and speaking time.
Written by Golam Rabbani, Founder & Lead Engineer
How to use this word counter
- Paste or type your text into the "Your text" field.
- Watch the nine live stat cards update on every keystroke — words, characters, sentences, paragraphs, unique words, reading time, speaking time, and the longest word.
- Press Copy summary to copy the headline stats to your clipboard as a single line.
- Press Reset to clear the text and return all counters to zero.
About this word counter
The word counter computes nine metrics in a single `useMemo` pass on every keystroke. Words are non-empty whitespace-separated tokens. Characters and characters-without-spaces are JavaScript string length and a whitespace-stripped variant. Sentences are split on `.`, `!`, or `?`. Paragraphs are blocks separated by blank lines. Unique words are counted after lowercasing and stripping punctuation. Reading time uses 200 wpm (silent reading average) and speaking time uses 130 wpm (TED-talk pace).
A concrete example. Paste the sentence:
`The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog. The dog barks.`
You get: 12 words, 60 characters (49 without spaces), 2 sentences, 1 paragraph, 9 unique words (because `the` and `dog` repeat), a longest word of "jumps", a reading time of "4 sec" at 200 wpm, and a speaking time of "6 sec" at 130 wpm.
This is useful for hitting a word count on essays and articles, sanity-checking blog post length, sizing scripts for podcasts and presentations, and spotting unusually long words during proofreading. All computation runs in your browser — no text is ever sent to a server.
FAQ
- What counts as a word?
- A word is a non-empty token separated by whitespace (spaces, tabs, or newlines). Hyphenated compounds like "high-quality" count as one word; "high quality" counts as two.
- Why is reading time set to 200 words per minute?
- 200 wpm is the average silent reading speed for adult native English readers. The actual range is roughly 175–300 wpm depending on text difficulty; 200 is a widely-cited midpoint used by Medium and other publishing platforms.
- How is speaking time calculated?
- Speaking time uses 130 words per minute — the standard pace used by professional voice actors and TED-talk speakers. Faster paces (160–180 wpm) sound rushed; slower (100 wpm) sounds laboured.
- How are unique words counted?
- Words are lowercased and stripped of surrounding punctuation, then deduplicated. So "Hello," and "hello" count as one unique word, while "run" and "running" count as two.
- What is the longest word stat for?
- It surfaces the single longest non-whitespace token in your text. Useful for spotting accidental URL pastes, very long compound nouns, or runaway typos like `aaaaaaaaaaa`.
- Does the tool send my text anywhere?
- No. All counting runs in your browser; nothing is uploaded, logged, or stored after you close the tab.