Count words, characters, sentences, vowels and consonants

Why the numbers disagree between tools

Copy a paragraph into three different counters and you will often get three different word counts. Nobody is broken. They just quietly disagree about whether state-of-the-art is one word or four, whether Dr. Chen arrived. is one sentence or two, and whether a family emoji is one character or five.

Those are real decisions, and hiding them is what makes counters feel untrustworthy. So this one publishes its rules, shows you the segmentation on screen, and lets you change the call that causes the most arguments — the letter Y. If you want the full specification, How we count sets out every rule in one place, and why word counts disagree explains where the common tools part company.

What you can do with it

• Hit a limit exactly. Essay word counts, character limits on bios and meta descriptions, SMS segments, application forms with a hard cap. Our character limit reference lists the numbers that matter most.
• Check readability before you send. Average sentence length and a reading-ease score tell you whether a paragraph is doing too much. There is a plain-English guide to what those scores actually mean.
• Study the letters themselves. The A–Z frequency comb makes vowel distribution visible, which is useful for teaching phonics, building word games, setting crosswords or testing a cipher. See the letter frequency reference for the baseline figures to compare against.
• Time a talk. Speaking time is estimated at 150 words per minute and reading at 238 — the figure from Brysbaert's review of reading-rate studies, rather than the round 200 that most tools inherited from nowhere in particular.

The five headline counts

Each of the five gets its own page, with the rules and the edge cases that apply to it and nothing else:

• Words — hyphens, contractions, numbers, URLs, and the targets people are usually writing towards.
• Characters — with and without spaces, why emoji are hard, and what platforms mean when they say "280 characters".
• Sentences — abbreviations, initials, decimals, ellipses, and what counts as the end of one.
• Vowels — including accented forms, and the difference between a vowel letter and a vowel sound.
• Consonants — everything else, and why vowels plus consonants never adds up to your character count.

Your text stays on your machine

There is no server behind the counting. It runs entirely in JavaScript on the page you are looking at, so drafts, transcripts, medical notes and anything else confidential never travel anywhere. Load the page, pull the network cable, and it still works.

To be precise about the one thing that is not local: the page itself is delivered by a web host, loads typefaces from Google Fonts, and carries advertising served by Google, all of which see your IP address the way any website's third parties do. None of them receive the text in the box. The privacy policy spells out exactly what each one gets.

Common questions