The essay must have 1,500 words, and the draft says somewhere near 1,380. The word counter shows the exact number while you type, together with characters, sentences, paragraphs and the reading time. The tiles update on every keystroke, and there is no Count button.
Using the word counter in five steps
- Type or paste your text into the box. It starts with a short sample text. Clear empties it.
- Read the six tiles above the box: Words, Characters, No spaces, Sentences, Paragraphs and Reading time.
- Look under the box at the list of the most frequent words.
- Edit the text and watch the numbers follow.
- Press Copy to put the whole text on the clipboard.
What the six tiles measure
- Words are groups of characters between whitespace. "well-known" is one word, but a lone "&" or "–" counts too. Chinese or Japanese text without spaces counts as one word per run.
- Sentences: the text is cut at every ".", "!" and "?".
- Paragraphs are non-empty lines, so one line break starts a new one. Blank lines are ignored.
- Characters include line breaks, and the No spaces tile removes all whitespace. Many emoji count as two characters, because the browser measures text in UTF-16 units. Other platforms can weigh links and emoji differently.
Why the sentence count runs high
"3.14", "e.g." and "Dr. Meyer" each add sentences, because every full stop is a cut. A row of dots, as in "Wait...", counts once.
What the keyword list leaves out
The list shows the eight most frequent words with their count and their share of all words in the text. It lowercases each word and strips punctuation, so "well-known" turns into "wellknown". It skips anything shorter than three letters and a short stop word list for the page language. It does no stemming: "tool" and "tools" are two entries. The share is rounded, so a word that appears once in a long text can show 0%. If "really" or the product name leads a 600-word draft, you see it at once.
Reading time is not speaking time
The tool divides the word count by 225 and rounds up to a whole minute. Any text up to 225 words shows 1 min, and an empty box shows 0 min. The figure fits silent reading. A spoken talk is slower, so do not time a presentation with it.
The text stays in this tab
JavaScript does the counting in your browser. Typing and the buttons send no request, and the network panel of your browser developer tools confirms it. Copy writes to the clipboard, and nothing is downloaded. The tool sets no maximum length, but it analyzes the whole text on every keystroke, so a very large text can slow typing.