Count Words is a free browser-based text analysis tool. Paste or type any text and it instantly reports word count, total character count, character count excluding spaces, sentence count, paragraph count, and an estimated reading time — six metrics computed together from a single pass over your text, with nothing to click until you actually want the numbers.
Word and character counts matter for reasons that go well beyond curiosity. Academic assignments almost always specify a word count range, and going noticeably under or over it can cost marks regardless of how good the writing is. Social platforms enforce hard character limits — a post that's one character too long simply won't post. Publishers and content briefs frequently specify a target word count for SEO or editorial reasons, and meeting it consistently is part of professional writing discipline. Meta descriptions, title tags, and ad copy all have practical character ceilings enforced by how platforms render them, not just style guides.
The distinction between total character count and character count without spaces matters more than people expect: a text-messaging character limit or a database VARCHAR field typically counts every character including spaces, whereas some older print or typesetting conventions historically counted only non-space characters. Having both numbers on screen at once means you don't have to guess which one a particular limit is referring to.
Reading time estimation is a genuinely useful, if approximate, piece of information for content strategy — showing readers "6 min read" at the top of an article sets expectations and is correlated with better engagement metrics in a lot of publishing research. It's calculated using an average adult reading speed, which is a reasonable approximation for general-audience prose but will run fast for dense technical writing and slow for very simple text.
Everything here runs synchronously in your browser as you interact with the tool — no text you paste in, however sensitive (draft manuscripts, confidential reports, personal journal entries), is ever transmitted to a server.
Need to reformat the text's casing too? Text Case Converter handles camelCase, snake_case, and more.
