Word Counter

Word count is the unit almost every writing brief is written in. University essays have a limit with a margin either side, journals and magazines commission by the word, and Google Ads and app stores cut text off at a fixed size. Knowing the number as you write keeps you from discovering a problem at the end.

It is also a decent proxy for time. At 238 words per minute, a reader gets through about 1,000 words in four minutes; at 150 words per minute, a speaker takes nearly seven minutes to say the same thing aloud.

The text is split on whitespace, and every resulting token that contains a letter or a number is counted as one word. That rule is simple enough to predict, which matters more in a counter than clever handling of edge cases:

• “state-of-the-art” — one word, because hyphens do not separate words.
• “don’t” — one word; an apostrophe is part of the word.
• “2,000” and “3.5” — one word each.
• “—” on its own — not a word, because it has no letters or numbers.
• “email@example.com” — one word.

Sentences are counted at full stops, question marks and exclamation marks, with decimals, initials and abbreviations like “Dr.” excluded. Paragraphs are blocks separated by a blank line. Every figure recalculates on your next keystroke.

The same panel counts lines and unique words. A line ends at a line break, not at the edge of the box, so text that wraps because the window is narrow is still one line — which is what makes the figure stable across screen sizes and useful for lists, scripts and data.

Use the words to pages calculator if your brief is set in pages rather than words, and the reading time calculator if it is set in minutes.

If you are over the limit, the quickest cuts are almost always structural rather than line-by-line. Look for the paragraph that repeats a point you have already made, the introduction that spends three sentences arriving at the subject, and the quotation that is longer than the comment on it.

If you are under, resist padding. Empty phrases are obvious to a marker and to a reader. Adding a concrete example, a counter-argument or an explanation of why the point matters gains words and improves the piece at the same time; thereadability checker will show you where a section is thin on substance.

Want the goal tracked as you type? The writing workspace has a word goal with a progress bar and saves your draft to your own device as you go.