Character & Word Counter
100% privateCounted as you type — and never uploaded.
This text stays in this tab. It is not uploaded, not saved and not stored — close the tab and it is gone.
Advanced options
238 is the measured average for adults reading English prose silently. Lower it for dense or technical writing.
130 is an unhurried presenting pace. Audiobook narration sits near 155.
Checking usage…
Most-used words
Start typing and the words you lean on most will appear here, with how often each one shows up.
How hard it is to read
A readability score needs a sentence or two to work with.
What it is made of
The breakdown of letters, digits, spaces and symbols will show up here.
Step by step
How to count the words in any text
Four steps, no account, no email address, and no ad sitting between you and the number you came for.
Add your text
Type it, paste it, or drag a .txt file anywhere onto this page. Nothing is sent when you do — the counting happens right here in the tab.
Read the counts
Words and characters update on every keystroke, along with sentences, paragraphs and how long the text takes to read aloud or in your head.
Check it against a limit
Writing a tweet, an SMS or a meta description? Pick the limit and a bar shows how much room is left — using each platform’s real counting rule, not a rough guess.
Take the numbers
Press Copy the counts to put a tidy summary on your clipboard, ready to paste into an email, a brief or a submission form.
Private by design
Why your writing never leaves this tab
A word counter sees your text before anyone else does — a cover letter, a legal clause, an unpublished chapter, a message you haven’t decided whether to send. Plenty of counters post that text to a server to count it, and some of the newer ones will happily feed it to an AI model on the way. This one has nowhere to send it, and you can prove that in about ten seconds.
Zero uploads
The counter is downloaded to your browser once, then does all its work on your device. Your text never enters a network request, so there is no copy of it for us to keep, lose, sell or be compelled to hand over. It is not used to train anything.
Nothing saved
We deliberately do not auto-save your draft, not even to your own browser’s storage. What you type exists in this tab’s memory and nowhere else. Close the tab and it is genuinely gone — there is no history to leak on a shared computer.
No account, no ads
No sign-up, no email capture, no word limit, no banner between you and the count, and no “upgrade to see readability”. Everything on this page is free and always visible.
To be precise about what does leave your device — because “100% private” is easy to say and worth checking. Three things, none of them your text:
1. The first time you type something substantial, this page sends one anonymous message to our counter saying “word-counter was used”. Not a word of your text, not its length, nothing identifying you. It exists so the usage number in the panel is a real one rather than something we invented.
2. Google Analytics records the page view and that the tool was used, the same as on every other page of this site. It is sent nothing about what you wrote. Block it and the counter works exactly the same.
3. When the page first loads, the fonts it is set in are fetched from Google Fonts, which means Google sees your IP address at that moment — the same as on every other page of this site. It learns nothing about your text. Once the page has loaded, that request never happens again, which is why the offline test below works.
Your text is in neither. It never enters a network request at all — and unlike a promise, that is something you can check. Turn off your wifi, reload this page and keep counting. It still works. No server-side counter can pass that test.
At a glance
Tool specifications
| Input | Typed or pasted text, or a dropped .txt, .md, .csv or .log file |
|---|---|
| Output | Live counts on screen, plus a plain-text summary you can copy |
| What counts as a word | Anything separated by spaces that contains a letter or digit. well-known is one word, a stray — is none. Chinese and Japanese characters count individually, because they are not written with spaces — the same rule Microsoft Word uses |
| What counts as a character | What you can see. A family emoji is 1 character, not 11, and an accented é is 1 whether or not it was typed as two code points |
| What counts as a sentence | Detected with your browser’s own language engine, with abbreviations handled — “Dr. Smith went home.” is one sentence, not two |
| What counts as a paragraph | A block of text separated by a blank line. Single line breaks are counted separately as lines |
| X / Twitter limit | X’s real weighted rule: Latin letters cost 1, emoji and CJK cost 2, out of 280 |
| SMS limit | Real GSM-7 encoding detection: 160 per message, dropping to 70 the moment one non-GSM character (a curly quote, an emoji) appears |
| Reading & speaking time | 238 and 130 words per minute by default, both adjustable |
| Readability | Flesch Reading Ease and Flesch–Kincaid grade level. English only, and an estimate |
| Text length limit | None enforced. Above ~300,000 characters the deeper analysis takes a moment; the headline counts stay instant |
| Where processing happens | In your browser, on your device — nothing is uploaded |
| Saved anywhere | No. Not on a server, and not in your browser’s storage either |
| Works offline | Yes, once the page has loaded, including as an installed app |
| Sign-up | Not required, not offered |
| Price | Free |
Questions
Counting words, answered
Is my text uploaded, stored, or used to train AI?
Does this match the word count in Microsoft Word?
well-known is one word and a stray dash is none. Small differences can appear if your document has footnotes, text boxes, headers or captions, because Word counts those and pasted text does not include them.How do you count emoji, accents and Chinese characters?
How many characters is a tweet, really?
Why does my text message split into two?
How is reading time worked out, and can I trust it?
What does the readability score actually mean?
Do I need to sign up, and is there a length limit?
Keep it handy
Save it, share it, or tell us what’s missing
Come back to it
Bookmark the page, or pin it to your saved tools so it sits at the top of the tools list on this device.
A number look wrong?
If a count disagrees with Word, a limit is out of date, or you need a language or a metric that isn’t here, tell us. The form opens with the tool already filled in, so you only have to describe what happened.
More free tools
Other things you can do here
Every one of these runs the same way — on your device, with nothing uploaded.