Count Words & Characters

No. Everything you type is counted entirely on your device - nothing is sent to a server. Turn off your Wi-Fi after the page loads and it still works. This page loads 1KB of JavaScript, gzipped - about what your browser’s network tab will show for this page’s own scripts.

Both counts are shown - one including every space, tab, and line break, and one counting only non-whitespace characters - so you can use whichever number a platform’s own limit (a tweet, a meta description, a form field) actually counts by.

Any run of non-space characters, split on whitespace. That keeps the count correct for languages that don’t primarily use spaces between letters the way English does, and for text with no ASCII letters at all - a letter-pattern tuned for English would undercount or zero out that kind of text entirely.

By counting runs of ., !, or ? that end a chunk of text, so an ellipsis (...) or a double punctuation mark (?!) counts as one sentence boundary, not two or three. This is a mechanical estimate, not real grammar parsing - an abbreviation like "Mr. Smith" still reads as a sentence break, the same limitation every simple sentence counter has.

From the word count, at 200 words per minute - a commonly cited average adult silent-reading speed. It’s an estimate for typical prose, not a measurement of your own reading speed, and rounds up (never down) so "1 min read" always means genuinely under two minutes.

Character and sentence counts work for any language. Word counts are most meaningful for languages that separate words with spaces (English, Spanish, Russian, and many others) - for a language that doesn’t use spaces between words at all (Chinese, Japanese), the character count is the more useful number.