Word Counter
Paste your text below and every count updates as you type — words, characters, sentences, paragraphs, and lines. Nothing is uploaded, so you can safely count a draft, a client document, or an unpublished manuscript.
What counts as a word
This tool counts a word as any run of characters separated by whitespace — the same rule Microsoft Word and Google Docs use. That means "state-of-the-art" counts as one word, "e.g." counts as one, and a number like "1,500" counts as one. Two spaces between words do not create a phantom extra word, and leading or trailing whitespace is ignored entirely.
Word counts people are usually checking against
- Academic essays — most universities allow ±10% of the stated limit, and usually exclude the bibliography and appendices. Check whether footnotes count.
- Blog posts — 1,000–2,000 words is the common range for a post intended to rank in search.
- Meta descriptions — roughly 155 characters, which is closer to 25 words. Use the character counter for these.
- Speeches — around 130 words per minute when spoken aloud, so a 5-minute talk is roughly 650 words. The reading time calculator works this out for you.
- UCAS / college applications — typically 4,000 characters or 47 lines, whichever comes first.
Why the count can differ from Word
Small discrepancies between tools are normal and almost always come down to three things: whether text inside headers, footers, and footnotes is included; how hyphenated and slash-separated compounds are split; and whether standalone numbers or symbols count as words. If you are submitting against a hard limit, always confirm with the exact tool your marker or editor will use, and leave a little headroom.