Word Counter

// What actually counts as a word

A word is a run of letters or digits, and the awkward cases are where counters disagree. A contraction is one word: don't, we'll, o'clock. A hyphenated compound is also one word — state-of-the-art counts once, not four times — which matches how a style guide and a submission brief count, and is where tools built on a plain space-split quietly differ from the number your editor expects. A number is one word whether it is written 3.14 or 1,000. Punctuation and standalone emoji are not words.

Chinese, Japanese, and Korean have no spaces between words, so a counter that splits on whitespace reports one word for an entire paragraph. This page segments those scripts properly, which is why 日本語のテキストです counts as four words rather than one.

A question mark or exclamation mark always ends a sentence. A full stop only ends one when a capital letter or a line break follows it, which is what keeps 3.14 and e.g. from being read as sentence endings. So an abbreviation does not end a sentence — Dr. Smith is one sentence rather than two — and a message typed without capitals runs its full stops together into one long sentence, though its question marks still break.

Paragraphs are blocks separated by a blank line; if your text has no blank lines at all, each line counts as one paragraph, which is what text pasted from a word processor usually needs.

// The reference numbers people are looking for

Pages: in 12pt Times New Roman with one-inch margins, a page holds roughly 500 words single-spaced and roughly 250 double-spaced. So 1,000 words is about two pages single-spaced or four double-spaced, and a 2,500-word paper runs to about ten double-spaced pages. The font matters more than people expect — Courier, still required for screenplays and some manuscript submissions, is far wider and runs closer to 250 words a page single-spaced.

Speeches: at a conversational 150 words per minute, five minutes is about 750 words, ten minutes about 1,500, and a 20-minute conference talk about 3,000. Reading aloud from a script tends to run faster than speaking from notes, so the written count is a floor, not a promise.

Reading time here uses 238 words per minute, the average silent reading rate for English non-fiction in Brysbaert's 2019 meta-analysis of 190 studies. The same paper puts fiction nearer 260. That is an average across readers and material: technical writing runs slower, familiar prose faster.

Essays: the Common Application personal statement is capped at 650 words with a 250-word floor. Coursework limits vary far too much by institution and subject to generalise, so check the brief rather than a rule of thumb. When a brief does give a number, it almost always means words rather than characters — which is why the word count is the largest number on this page.

// Platform limits, and how each platform counts

An X post is limited to 280, but X does not count characters evenly. Its light range covers every code point up to U+10FF, so Latin, Cyrillic, modern Greek, Hebrew, Arabic, Thai, and the Indic scripts all count as one each, as do typographic dashes and curly quotes. Chinese, Japanese, and Korean characters count as two, as does every emoji — so 280 Latin or Russian characters fit, and 140 Japanese ones fill the same post. The meter on this page applies that weighting. It does not model X's other rule — every link is charged a fixed 23 characters however long the URL is — so a draft containing links measures longer here than it will there.

Instagram captions stop at 2,200 characters and LinkedIn posts at 3,000, both counted plainly. A YouTube title stops at 100. A single SMS segment holds 160 characters in the GSM 7-bit alphabet, but one emoji or curly quote switches the whole message to a wider encoding where a segment holds 70; the SMS meter here switches with it and says so. Longer messages still send — they just bill as several.

The meta description is the odd one out: Google truncates it by pixel width, not character count, so there is no hard limit to hit. Around 160 characters is a working guideline for desktop results, which is why it appears here as one. If the exact truncation matters, the SERP snippet preview renders it at the real width.

// Why a counter should not want your text

The most-visited word counters are attached to something that wants your writing: a grammar checker, a paraphraser, or a keyword tool. The counting is free because the text is the product, and it is uploaded to be counted.

There is no reason for that. Counting words is arithmetic on a string, and the Unicode segmentation needed to do it properly has been built into browsers since Firefox picked it up in 2024. This page runs entirely on your device, keeps nothing, and stores nothing between visits — reload it and your text is gone, replaced by the sample it opens with. It also works with the network off, and on a browser too old to segment it says so rather than quietly counting differently.

That matters most for exactly the text people paste into a counter: an unpublished chapter, a cover letter, a dissertation chapter under embargo, a client's brief. If a page counts your words on a server, it has your words.

// fair questions

How does this tool decide what counts as a word?

It uses the browser's Unicode word segmentation, so contractions stay whole, numbers like 1,000 count once, and Chinese, Japanese, and Korean text is split into real words instead of one long run. On top of that, a hyphenated compound such as state-of-the-art is counted as one word rather than four, which matches how style guides and word-count briefs treat it.

How many pages is 1,000 words?

About two pages single-spaced, or four double-spaced, in 12pt Times New Roman with one-inch margins. A narrower font fits more and a wide one such as Courier noticeably less, so treat it as an estimate rather than a guarantee.

How many words is a 5-minute speech?

Roughly 750 words at a conversational 150 words per minute. Ten minutes is about 1,500 and a 20-minute talk about 3,000. Speaking from a script usually runs faster than speaking from notes, so treat the number as a lower bound.

Do emoji and accented characters count as one character?

Here, yes. A flag, a skin-toned thumbs-up, and a multi-person emoji each count as one character, as does an accented letter however it is encoded. Platforms differ, which is why the X meter can disagree with the character count above it: X charges every emoji two, and charges two for Chinese, Japanese, and Korean characters — though not for Cyrillic, modern Greek, Arabic, or Hebrew, which it counts as one each.

Why does my sentence or paragraph count look different elsewhere?

Most counters end a sentence at every full stop, so Dr. Smith counts as two. This one treats common abbreviations as part of the sentence, and it needs a capital letter or a line break after a full stop before starting a new one — so all-lowercase writing counts as fewer sentences here than elsewhere. Question marks and exclamation marks are unaffected and always end a sentence. For paragraphs it splits on blank lines, falling back to one paragraph per line when the text contains no blank lines at all, the shape text usually has when pasted out of a word processor.

Is my text stored or sent anywhere?

No. Counting happens on your device as you type. Nothing is uploaded, nothing is saved between visits, and there is no autosave — closing the tab discards the text. The page keeps working with no network connection.