Free Word Counter

It reports words, characters, characters without whitespace, sentences, paragraphs, lines, estimated reading minutes, speaking minutes, and average words per sentence. All of that is computed in the page as you type. Nothing is sent to GenShelf.

HTML tags are stripped so pasted rich text does not inflate the total. A word matches [A-Za-z0-9]+(?:['’-][A-Za-z0-9]+)* — so don’t and well-known count as one word each. Bullet characters are treated as separators.

Sentences split on . ? ! … followed by space or end of string. Trailing text without terminal punctuation still counts as one sentence. Paragraphs split on blank lines. Lines split on newline. Character count is JavaScript string length, including spaces.

Silent reading uses 230 words per minute; speaking uses 130. Both round up with a floor of one minute when there is any text, so a 40-word caption still shows ~1 min rather than “0.” These are planning estimates, not lab measurements of your audience.

Use character count for titles and meta descriptions, word count for drafts, and minutes for talks. Do not pad a thin page to hit a blog-length rumor — cover the query, then stop. Targets by format: word count targets for writers, students, and SEO.

The draft never leaves this browser for counting. There is no paste history on a server. If you are editing something confidential, remember that browser extensions can still read the page.