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Word Counter

A free, real-time word and character counter. Type or paste any text and instantly see your word count, character count, and more — everything runs in your browser with no data sent anywhere.

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Word Counter

Count characters and words in real time

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Characters
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Words
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Lines
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Paragraphs
Your Text

How to use Word Counter

  1. 1 Type directly into the text area, or paste text from any source — a document, webpage, email draft, essay, or code file.
  2. 2 The word count, character count (with and without spaces), and sentence count update instantly as you type.
  3. 3 Use the counts to check against a target — for example, a 500-word essay limit, a 280-character tweet limit, or a 160-character SMS limit.
  4. 4 Clear the text area and paste new content at any time to start a fresh count.

Features

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Real-time word count
The word count updates on every keystroke with no delay or button to press.
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Character count
See total characters including spaces, and optionally excluding spaces.
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Fully private
Your text never leaves your browser. Safe to use with confidential drafts or sensitive documents.
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No sign-up required
Open the page and start typing. No account, no login, no rate limits.

Common use cases

Students and academic writers use it to check essay and assignment word counts against submission limits before copying into their word processor or learning management system.

Content writers and bloggers use it to gauge article length, meet SEO content targets, and ensure consistency across pages without relying on a full word processor.

Social media managers use it to check character counts before posting to platforms with strict limits — such as Twitter/X (280 characters), SMS (160 characters), or meta descriptions (155 characters).

Translators and copyeditors use it to quickly measure source and target text lengths during review, without opening multiple applications.

Developers use it to count characters in strings, template literals, or configuration values before encoding or storing them.

Frequently asked questions

How does word counting work?

The tool splits the input text on whitespace (spaces, tabs, and line breaks) and counts the resulting tokens as words. Consecutive whitespace characters count as a single delimiter, so extra spaces between words do not inflate the word count. Character counting is done separately by measuring the length of the text string, with an option to exclude whitespace characters.

Is this word counter free?

Yes. Word Counter is completely free to use with no sign-up, no rate limits, and no premium tier. There are no restrictions on how much text you can count.

Is my text private?

Yes. All counting happens locally in your browser using JavaScript. Your text is never sent to any server, stored in a database, or logged anywhere. It is safe to paste confidential drafts, legal documents, or any sensitive content.

Can I count words in languages other than English?

Yes, for most languages. The whitespace-based word counting approach works well for any language that uses spaces to separate words, including European languages, Arabic, and many others. It is not optimized for languages without word separators like Chinese or Japanese, which use different linguistic units.