Word counter online — free word and character count

Fitting a draft into a word limit

1. 1

   Paste the draft: Bring in the text exactly as it will be submitted.

2. 2

   Read the word total: It updates on every keystroke, with no button to press.

3. 3

   Account for the rule: Hyphens and apostrophes raise the count relative to a word processor.

4. 4

   Trim and copy: Edit until the total sits under the cap, then take the text away.

Your word processor and this page will not always agree

Word processors bundle hyphenated compounds and contractions into single words. This counter does not, because it has no dictionary and refuses to guess at one.

The result is predictable rather than clever: "state-of-the-art" is four words here, "don't" is two, and "3.14" is two. Knowing the rule is worth more than a number that is right by accident.

Working with the rule instead of against it

• Hyphenated compounds inflate the total — check them if you are near a hard cap.
• Contractions split at the apostrophe, so dialogue-heavy text reads higher.
• Numbers with a decimal or thousands separator count as two.
• Accented and non-Latin text counts normally: ação and 世界 are words like any other.
• An empty document is zero lines, but a trailing newline opens a line that counts.
• For a hard character cap rather than a word cap, use the character counter instead.

Why there is no dictionary behind this

A counter that knew "don't" is one word would need to know the language first, then the exceptions, then the exceptions per language. It would be right more often and wrong unpredictably, which is worse for someone checking a limit.

A rule you can state in a sentence lets you predict the answer before you paste. Every example above is asserted by a test in our repository, so the documented behaviour and the shipped behaviour cannot drift apart.

Lines, paragraphs and the trailing newline

Lines are counted by splitting on the line break, which handles the Windows, classic Mac and Unix conventions alike. An empty document reports zero, a single word reports one — and a single word followed by a newline reports two, because that break opens an empty line.

Paragraphs are separated by a blank line, with empty runs discarded. Pasting text with double spacing between every line will therefore report many more paragraphs than the document appears to have.

What this is genuinely good for

Hard external limits: an abstract capped at 250 words, a bio field, a form that truncates silently. In those cases you want a number that is stable and explainable, not one that matches your editor.

It is a poor fit for billing by word, where the client's definition governs, and for readability scoring, which needs sentence parsing this page deliberately does not attempt.

When the bottleneck is the writing setup

Counting is the last five seconds of the job. If the drafting itself is where time disappears — reformatting, losing versions, fighting the editor — that is where a better tool pays for itself, not in a more accurate total.

Word counting questions

Specifications behind the counting rule

• Unicode Standard Annex #29 — Text Segmentation (word boundaries)
• MDN — Unicode character class escapes in regular expressions