RashTools

    Word Counter

    Count words, characters & reading time

    Words

    0

    Characters

    0

    Characters (no spaces)

    0

    Sentences

    0

    Paragraphs

    0

    Lines

    0

    Reading time

    1 min

    Speaking time

    1 min

    Count words, characters and reading time

    Live counts for words, characters with and without spaces, sentences, paragraphs and estimated reading time.

    Hit a limit exactly

    Essays, applications, meta descriptions and bios all come with hard limits. Watch the count while you edit rather than after.

    Try this tool
    Hit a limit exactly

    Characters with and without spaces

    Translation quotes, ad copy and some forms count them differently, so both numbers are shown.

    Open QR Code Generator
    Characters with and without spaces

    Reading time and keyword frequency

    See how long a piece takes to read and which words you have overused — useful before publishing.

    Open Auto Loan Calculator
    Reading time and keyword frequency

    Step-by-step guide

    How to use Word Counter?

    Count words, characters, sentences, paragraphs and estimated reading time in any text.

    Step-by-step instructions

    1. 1

      Paste or type your text into the box.

    2. 2

      See live counts for words, characters, sentences and paragraphs.

    3. 3

      Check estimated reading and speaking time.

    4. 4

      Copy the cleaned text if you need to.

    Benefits

    • Live counts that update as you type.
    • Reading and speaking time estimates.
    • Character count with and without spaces.
    • Handles very long documents fast.

    Who is it for?

    • Students meeting essay word limits
    • Writers hitting article targets
    • Copywriters checking tweet/meta lengths

    FAQ

    Frequently asked questions

    Paste your essay into the large textarea on the site or click the Upload file button to import a .txt, .docx, .rtf or .pdf file. The tool updates counts in real time and shows Words, Characters (with and without spaces), Sentences, Paragraphs and Reading Time in the stats bar below the editor. Use the Copy button to copy cleaned text or Download .txt to save the current contents; Clear empties the editor. For very large essays (>500,000 characters) split into parts to avoid browser memory issues.

    You can upload plain text (.txt), Microsoft Word (.docx), Rich Text (.rtf) and text-based PDF (.pdf) files; scanned image PDFs won’t extract text. The practical upload recommendation is up to 10 MB for smooth performance in all browsers, and Chrome/Firefox on desktop can handle files up to ~50 MB but may become slow. iOS Safari and older Android WebViews struggle above ~2–5 MB because of WebKit memory limits. If you hit problems, copy the text into a .txt file and upload smaller chunks.

    Reading time is calculated using a default speed of 200 words per minute and displays minutes and seconds; that default appears in the Settings (gear) icon. Click Settings to change the WPM value to 250 or a custom number, which immediately updates the reading-time estimate in the stats bar. The tool applies a simple division (words/WPM) and rounds to the nearest second, so very short texts may show 0:01 even if under a full minute.

    Click Analyze Frequency beneath the editor to get a sortable list of the top 50 words, each with raw counts and percentage of total words. There is an Exclude common words toggle (stopwords) that removes items like "the", "and", "of"; you can also add custom words to the Exclude list if you want to ignore names or repeated phrases. Results update instantly and you can Export CSV to download the frequency table for SEO or essay editing.

    Differences usually come from what each app includes: Microsoft Word counts footnotes, endnotes, text in headers/footers and hidden text by default, while our tool counts only the visible text you paste or the extracted text layer in a PDF. Word may treat hyphenated compounds and contractions differently; our parser counts words separated by whitespace and common punctuation. For scanned PDFs, Word with OCR might count text our site can’t extract; run OCR in Acrobat or save as .docx first to get comparable results.

    Yes, the stats bar shows Sentence and Paragraph counts; sentences are detected by punctuation markers (., ?, !) followed by a space or line break, and abbreviations like "e.g." are handled heuristically to avoid false splits. Paragraphs are determined by double line breaks or a single newline when Smart paragraphs is enabled in Settings. If your text uses single-line wrapping rather than hard breaks, enable the Treat soft wraps as paragraphs option to get accurate paragraph counts.

    The tool only extracts text from PDFs that contain an embedded text layer (.pdf with selectable text). If you upload a scanned or image-only PDF, no text will be extracted and the editor will remain empty or show binary content placeholder. In that case run OCR first using Acrobat Pro, Adobe Scan, or an open-source tool like Tesseract, export to .docx or .txt, then re-upload. The tool displays an error message "No text found in PDF" when this occurs so you know OCR is required.

    The stats panel shows Characters with spaces and Characters without spaces as separate values; line breaks are counted as single characters in the with-spaces total and omitted in the without-spaces number. Special Unicode characters (em dashes, non-breaking spaces, emoji) are counted according to JavaScript string length, which treats surrogate pairs as two code units in some browsers; Settings offers Normalize Unicode to produce consistent counts. For exact byte counts (for strict upload limits), download the .txt and check file size in your OS.

    All processing is done client-side in your browser by default, so pasted text is not sent to our servers; you can verify this by disconnecting from the network after loading the page and seeing counts still update. Uploaded files are only used in-browser for extraction; the site may optionally upload files for advanced PDF parsing with your explicit consent (a dialog appears if server-side OCR is needed). The tool is free, requires no signup, and exports have no watermark — if you allow server processing you will be informed before any upload occurs.

    Very long texts consume browser memory and CPU for live counting and frequency analysis, so pasting manuscripts over ~500,000 characters (roughly 80,000–100,000 words) can cause Chrome or Firefox to spike CPU or Safari on macOS/iOS to crash. To avoid this, split the document into chapters and upload or paste each part separately, or turn off Analyze Frequency which stops the heavy top-50 computation. On desktop Chrome, increasing available memory and closing other tabs helps; on mobile use smaller chunks under 50 KB to keep the UI responsive.

    Yes, the site works in mobile browsers, but behavior differs: Android Chrome and Samsung Browser support file uploads of .docx/.pdf and handle larger inputs better than iOS Safari, which restricts memory and disallows drag-and-drop. On iPhone you may need to paste text or use the Files picker to upload small documents (under ~2–5 MB) to avoid crashes. For long-form editing, use desktop Chrome/Firefox; on mobile use the Copy button to quickly copy cleaned text back into another app.

    You can Export CSV from the word frequency analyzer and Download .txt to save the current textarea contents; use Copy to place the cleaned text directly on your clipboard for pasting into an LMS, Google Docs or Twitter. The CSV contains columns for word, count and percentage and opens in Excel or Google Sheets; the .txt is UTF-8 encoded to preserve Unicode. If you need a PDF report, paste the downloaded .txt into Word or Google Docs and print-to-PDF, since the site does not generate formatted PDFs itself.

    About this tool

    Real-time word, character and reading-time counter

    Writers, students and editors often need to hit a target word count, stay under a character limit on social media, or estimate how long it will take an audience to read or speak a passage. Paste any text into the counter and you'll see words, characters with and without spaces, sentences, paragraphs, and an estimated reading and speaking time updated as you type.

    Nothing is ever sent to a server — the entire counter runs in your browser. Use it for assignments, tweets, blog drafts, scripts and SEO snippets.

    Related tools