Word & Character Counter

A word and character counter analyzes text to provide detailed statistics including word count, character count, sentence count, paragraph count, line count, and estimated reading time. Writers, students, content creators, and developers use these metrics daily to meet length requirements, optimize content, and understand text structure.

Accurate word counting is harder than it looks. Simple tools that split on spaces miscount hyphenated words ("well-known" is one word, not two), contractions ("don't" is one word), numbers with units ("100px" is one token), and abbreviations. They also fail with non-Latin scripts, mixed-language content, and code snippets. A good word counter needs smart tokenization that handles these edge cases correctly.

This word counter uses an intelligent tokenizer that properly handles hyphenated words, contractions, numbers with units, and Unicode characters including CJK (Chinese, Japanese, Korean) text. It also detects abbreviations to avoid miscounting sentence endings, provides dual reading time estimates (slow and fast readers), and shows word frequency analysis. All processing happens in your browser — your text is never uploaded anywhere.

1. Paste or type your text — Enter any text in the input area. The counter updates all statistics in real-time as you type.
2. Review the statistics — Eight stat cards show characters (with and without spaces), words, sentences, paragraphs, lines, and reading time estimates for both slow (200 wpm) and fast (300 wpm) readers.
3. Check word frequency — The Top Words section shows the 10 most frequently used words in your text with their occurrence counts. Words shorter than 2 characters are excluded.
4. Edit and iterate — Modify your text and watch all statistics update instantly. Use the counts to meet specific length requirements or optimize content density.

• Smart word tokenization — Counts hyphenated words ("state-of-the-art") as single words, handles contractions ("don't", "it's"), and recognizes numbers with units ("100px", "3.5em") as single tokens.
• Accurate sentence detection — Identifies sentence boundaries using punctuation (.!?) while correctly handling abbreviations (Dr., Mr., etc.) that end with periods but aren't sentence endings.
• Character count with and without spaces — Shows both total characters and characters excluding whitespace, useful for systems that count differently (Twitter counts spaces, some SMS systems don't).
• Reading time estimation — Dual estimates at 200 words per minute (average reader) and 300 words per minute (fast reader), with automatic formatting for minutes and hours.
• Word frequency analysis — Top 10 most-used words with occurrence counts. Useful for identifying overused words, checking keyword density for SEO, or analyzing writing patterns.
• 100% client-side — Your text is processed entirely in your browser. Nothing is sent to any server, stored, or logged.

• Meeting content length requirements — Check word counts for blog posts (typically 1,000-2,000 words for SEO), academic papers with strict word limits, social media posts with character limits, or job application essays.
• SEO content optimization — Use word frequency analysis to check keyword density, ensure target keywords appear enough times, and identify overused filler words in your content.
• Academic writing — Track word counts for essays, dissertations, and research papers with strict length requirements. The character count (without spaces) is used in some academic systems.
• Reading time estimation — Estimate how long your article, documentation, or presentation script will take to read. Medium.com uses reading time as a core content metric.
• Translation project scoping — Translators price work per word. Get accurate word counts for quotes and project planning, especially for multilingual content.