Word Counter — Count Words, Characters and Lines
Paste or type your text and click COUNT WORDS for the word count, or FULL STATS for words and lines together. The same page counts characters with and without spaces. Counting happens in your browser; nothing you paste is uploaded or stored.
What each button counts
| Button | Result |
|---|---|
| COUNT WORDS | Words: N — every run of characters separated by whitespace |
| FULL STATS | Words: N and Lines: N (non-empty lines) |
| COUNT CHARS | Characters: N — including spaces and line breaks |
| NO SPACES | Characters (no spaces): N |
| COUNT LINES | Lines: N — lines with at least one non-space character |
How words are counted
A word is any sequence of characters between whitespace — spaces, tabs or line breaks. That matches how most editors and word processors count:
well-knownis one word (hyphens do not split words).don'tis one word.3.14,#hashtag,@nameandhttps://example.comeach count as one word.- A dash surrounded by spaces (
a — b) counts as a word of its own, as it does in most counters. - Languages written without spaces between words (Chinese, Japanese, Thai) are counted per space-separated run, so a whole sentence may count as one word; use the character count for those.
Typical length targets
| Content | Typical length |
|---|---|
| Meta description | 25–30 words (about 155 characters) |
| Tweet / X post | up to 280 characters, roughly 40–55 words |
| Blog post | 1,000–2,000 words for an in-depth article |
| Abstract | 150–250 words |
| Short-answer essay | often 250–650 words |
These are common conventions, not rules; your publisher, platform or assignment brief is the authority.
Reading time
At an average reading speed of about 200–250 words per minute, divide the word count by 225 for a rough reading time: 1,350 words ≈ 6 minutes.
Related tools
- Character Counter
- Line Counter
- LLM Token Counter — count tokens instead of words for AI prompts
- Sort Words