Word Counter

Almost every piece of writing has a limit attached to it. An essay has a word count, a meta description gets cut off at around 160 characters, a tweet stops at 280, and a LinkedIn headline is capped at 220. This counter tells you where you stand against all of them at once, updating on every keystroke so you can edit down to a target instead of pasting into a checker over and over.

It counts five things: words, characters with spaces, characters without spaces, sentences and paragraphs. Words are separated on any run of whitespace, so hyphenated compounds like "well-known" count as one word and an em-dash between words does not merge them. Sentences are counted on terminating punctuation, and common abbreviations are not treated as sentence endings. Paragraphs are separated by blank lines, which matches how most editors and word processors behave.

Reading time is calculated at 225 words per minute, roughly the average adult silent reading speed for general prose, and speaking time at 130 words per minute, which is a comfortable presentation pace. Both are estimates meant for planning a talk or setting expectations on an article, not precise measurements.

Your text is never sent anywhere. The counting happens in the page itself, which means you can safely paste an unpublished draft, a client document or anything else you would not want sitting in a server log.