Word and character counter
Count words, characters, lines and CJK — with a reading-time estimate.
Input
Result
The result will appear here.Your runs
Only runs that cost points are saved.
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Counts words, characters with and without spaces, lines, sentences and paragraphs, and estimates reading time. Unlike most counters it counts CJK characters as words rather than dropping them, so a Chinese or Japanese document gets a real number instead of one that reflects only its Latin text.
How it works
- CJK characters are counted individually and included in the word total.
- Reading time uses 200 words per minute for Latin text and 300 characters per minute for CJK.
- Everything is counted in the page, on exactly the text in the box.
Where your data goes
Nowhere. This tool runs entirely in your browser: the text you paste is processed by the page and is never transmitted to a server or written to a log.
When a run costs points, a one-line summary is saved to your own history so you can find it again. The summary records the shape of the run — sizes, counts, the values you looked up — never the content you pasted.
What it costs
This tool is free, with no sign-in and no points.
Common questions
- Why do other counters report zero words for my Chinese text?
- They split on whitespace, and Chinese does not use it. Every character becomes part of one enormous word, which then rounds to nothing useful. Counting characters is the standard measure for CJK.
- Which count do editors and assignments mean?
- For English, words. For Chinese and Japanese, characters — usually including punctuation, which is what the character count here shows.
- How accurate is the reading time?
- It is an estimate at typical silent-reading speed. Dense technical prose runs slower and light narrative faster, easily by half.
The open-source behind it
This tool is a self-contained implementation. words/wordcount (MIT) does the same job as a library — if you need this behaviour inside your own program, start there rather than calling a web page.
words/wordcountAlso known as
- word counter
- character count
- 字数统计
- text statistics
- reading time calculator