Word Counter
Count words and characters.
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What counting words is actually measuring
A word count sounds unambiguous and is not. Software counts words by splitting text on whitespace, so hyphenated compounds, numbers, URLs, and em dashes all produce different totals depending on the rules applied. Character counts split further still: counting with spaces, without spaces, or by Unicode code points, which is why an emoji can count as two characters and an Arabic or Chinese passage counts very differently from its English translation.
Around the raw numbers sit useful derived figures. Reading time is a simple division — average adult reading speed is roughly 200 to 250 words per minute for ordinary prose. Sentence and paragraph counts show structure at a glance, and average sentence length is one of the strongest readability signals there is: consistently long sentences make a text harder to follow regardless of vocabulary.
Why we built this tool
Almost every kind of writing has a limit attached. University essays and journal submissions have strict counts, job applications cap the personal statement, meta descriptions have to fit within roughly 155 characters, and social platforms count every character including spaces.
The text being counted is unpublished by definition — a dissertation, a client proposal, a covering letter, a press release under embargo. Pasting it into a website that transmits every keystroke to a server is a strange risk for a task that is basic arithmetic. Ours counts in your browser as you type, with no request leaving the page, nothing stored, and no length limit. It also works offline, which is where a lot of writing actually happens.
Tips and common mistakes
- Check whether your institution counts footnotes, references, and captions before trusting any total.
- Character limits on social platforms count spaces, emoji, and URLs — often as more characters than they appear.
- Meta descriptions are truncated around 155 characters in most search results.
- Average sentence length is a better readability signal than total word count.
Open Word Counter with a link
Word Counter can be handed its input by the link that opens it, so the page arrives with the work already done. This is meant for assistants and scripts: if a chatbot, an editor extension, or a command-line agent already holds your content, it can build a link instead of asking you to copy and paste into a box.
The payload rides in the fragment — the part of a URL after the #. Browsers never send the fragment to a server, so anything handed over this way stays on your device exactly as a dropped file would. A link that uses the query string instead is rewritten into the fragment by the page before any analytics or ad script can read the address.
Prefix any field with gz — #gztext= — to pass it as gzip-compressed base64url, which fits roughly five to ten times more into the same link. Links stay reliable up to about 8,000 characters; past that, chat apps and address bars start truncating them, and the page says so rather than loading half a document.
One exception to the privacy rule: ?url= tells the page to download the input from an address. That request goes from your browser straight to that server — not through ours — but it does leave your device, and it only works if the server allows cross-origin requests.
#text=— the text to work on
Example: https://mygadgets.ink/tools/word-counter/#text=...
Quick start: using Word Counter
- Paste or type your text into the input area above.
- Read the live counts for words, characters, sentences, and paragraphs.
- Check the character count with and without spaces if you are working to a strict limit.
- Use the estimated reading time to judge whether the piece suits its audience.
- Edit directly in the box and watch the numbers update as you cut.
Tidy the text first with Remove Extra Spaces, or shorten it with Summarizer.