Word Counter
Measure a piece of writing the way an editor would: words, characters with and without spaces, sentences, paragraphs, reading time at your own pace, and the words that appear most often once the filler is out of the way. Everything is counted in the browser, so an unpublished draft stays unpublished.
About 200 for adult reading of general prose; lower for technical material, higher for skimming.
The most frequent words, ignoring the common short ones that tell you nothing.
How word counter works
- Paste the textThe figures update as you type, in the browser.
- Set your reading paceA technical paper is slower to read than a blog post, and the estimate should say so.
- Check the vocabularyThe most frequent words usually show exactly which idea the piece is circling.
What you get
Count words, characters, sentences and paragraphs, with a reading time. Everything happens inside this page: the file is read by your browser, transformed in memory and handed straight back to you as a download. There is no upload queue, no waiting for a server, and nothing left behind when you close the tab.
Supported formats
This tool works on text you paste or type, so there is no file format to worry about. Nothing you type is sent anywhere.
Limitations, stated up front
- Sentence counting is a heuristic and will be thrown by abbreviations, decimals and lists.
- Reading time is a division, not a measurement. It knows nothing about difficulty or the reader.
- Frequent-word counting excludes short common words, so a piece built on one preposition will look thinner than it reads.
Frequently asked questions
How are words counted?
By whitespace. Anything separated by a space, a tab or a line break is a word, which is how word processors do it. So a hyphenated pair counts as one word, and a number with a thousands separator counts as one, while some other tools count both halves.
Why is the sentence count approximate?
Because there is no reliable way to count sentences in a string. A full stop inside an abbreviation, a decimal number like 3.14, or a bullet fragment with no full stop at all each break a naive counter. Furtu splits on a full stop, an exclamation mark, a question mark and an ellipsis followed by whitespace, which handles ordinary prose well and says so rather than claiming precision it does not have.
How accurate is the reading time?
It is a division: words divided by words per minute. It assumes steady reading at that pace, which is a best case. Any real reading involves rereading a hard sentence, looking a word up, or stopping, so treat the number as a floor and set your own speed to see how much it moves.
Is my draft uploaded?
No. Counting is arithmetic on a string, done in the tab. Nothing is transmitted, and the text is only in memory while the page is open.