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.
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.
- Check readability before you send. Average sentence length and a reading-ease score tell you whether a paragraph is doing too much.
- 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.
- Time a talk. Speaking time is estimated at 150 words per minute, reading at 238 — the figure from Brysbaert's review of reading-rate studies, rather than the 200 that most tools inherited from nowhere in particular.
How each count is defined
Most counters give you a number and never tell you what they measured, which is why three tools can disagree about the same paragraph. Here are our rules, in full.
- Characters
- Grapheme clusters — what a human would point at and call one character. An emoji like 👨👩👧 counts as 1, not 5. Accented letters count as 1 whether they were typed as a single character or as a letter plus a combining accent.
- Words
- A run of letters or digits, held together by apostrophes, hyphens and internal
periods.
don't,state-of-the-art,3.14andU.S.A.are each one word. Links and email addresses count as one word each. - Sentences
- Text ending in
.!?or…, followed by a space or the end of the text. Titles like Dr. and Mt. never end a sentence, initials like J. R. R. are held together, and decimals such as 3.14 are left alone. A line break also ends a sentence, so headings and bullet points are counted properly. - Vowels
- A, E, I, O, U, plus their accented forms — café has two vowels, naïve has three. Y is handled by whichever rule you pick above.
- Consonants
- Every other letter. Digits, spaces and punctuation are neither vowels nor consonants, which is why vowels plus consonants is smaller than your character count.
One thing worth being clear about: this counts letters, not sounds. Queue has four vowel letters and one vowel sound. If you need phonetic syllables rather than written vowels, the syllable estimate in the panel above is closer to what you want.
Your text stays on your machine
There is no server here. The counting runs entirely in JavaScript on the page you are looking at, so drafts, transcripts and anything confidential never travel anywhere. You can disconnect from the internet and it will keep working.
Common questions
How do I count words, characters and sentences at the same time?
Paste your text into the box at the top of this page. Words, characters, sentences, vowels and consonants all update together as you type, along with paragraphs, syllables, unique words, reading time and a readability score. Nothing needs to be submitted and there is no button to press.
Is this word counter free?
Yes, completely, with no sign-up, no limits on how much text you can paste, and no advertising interruptions.
Does my text get uploaded anywhere?
No. Every count is calculated in your own browser using JavaScript. Your text is never sent to a server, stored, or logged.
Why is my count different from Microsoft Word?
Word treats hyphenated compounds, abbreviations and emoji differently, and it counts characters as UTF-16 units rather than as visible characters. We chose rules that match how a person reads text rather than how older software stores it. All the rules are listed above so you can see exactly where the two will differ.
Can I count text in languages other than English?
Character, word, sentence and paragraph counts work for any language written with spaces between words. The vowel and consonant counts are built for English and the Latin alphabet, so they are not meaningful for Arabic, Hebrew, Chinese, Japanese or Hindi.
What is the maximum amount of text I can paste?
There is no hard limit. Above about 15,000 characters the letter colouring switches off automatically to keep typing smooth, but every count stays accurate no matter how long the document is.