Word and Character Counter
Words, characters, sentences and reading time, broken down by paragraph.
About this tool
Counts words, characters with and without spaces, sentences and paragraphs, and estimates reading and speaking time.
The per-paragraph breakdown is the part worth having. A single total tells you almost nothing: one 400-word paragraph and eight 50-word ones have the same count and read completely differently. The breakdown shows you where the wall of text is.
Common questions
Does word count affect rankings?
Not directly. There is no threshold to clear. Longer pages often rank better because thorough answers need more words, not because length itself is rewarded — padding a thin page to 2,000 words changes nothing.
Which character count do I want?
With spaces, almost always. Meta descriptions, tweets and form limits all count spaces. The without-spaces figure is only useful for a few legacy systems.
How is reading time calculated?
Words divided by 230 per minute, the usual average for silent reading of ordinary prose. Dense technical material is slower; assume the estimate is optimistic.
How are words counted?
By splitting on anything that is not a letter, number, apostrophe or hyphen. So "state-of-the-art" is one word and "it's" is one word, which matches how people count by hand.