Word Counter
Live word, character, sentence, and reading time stats. Updates as you type.
How it works
Whether you are writing a blog post with a 1,500-word target, drafting a tweet within 280 characters, or estimating how long a speech will take, word and character counts are fundamental metrics. This tool provides them instantly, updating in real time as you type — no button to click, no form to submit.
The counter tracks six metrics simultaneously: word count (splitting on whitespace and punctuation boundaries), total characters (including spaces), characters without spaces (useful for CJK text and SMS limits), sentences (detected by terminal punctuation), paragraphs (blocks separated by blank lines), and estimated reading time (based on 238 words per minute, the average adult silent reading speed).
All computation runs in your browser using the Bytario core text analysis library. Your text never leaves the page. This matters because the text you are counting might be a confidential legal document, a private journal entry, or unpublished manuscript content. No server sees it, no analytics track it.
For programmatic access — analyzing thousands of documents, integrating word counts into a CMS pipeline, or computing reading times for an article feed — the same logic is available through the Bytario API.
FAQ
How is reading time calculated?
Reading time is estimated at 238 words per minute, which is the average silent reading speed for adult English readers (based on Brysbaert, 2019). Actual reading time varies by content complexity and reader proficiency.
Does this count words in Chinese, Japanese, or Korean?
CJK languages do not use spaces between words, so word segmentation is approximate. Character count is exact. For precise CJK word counts, use a language-specific tokenizer.
Are hyphens and contractions one word or two?
"Well-known" counts as one word (hyphenated compound). "Don't" counts as one word (contraction). This matches the convention used by Microsoft Word and Google Docs.
Can I count words in a file?
Currently this tool accepts pasted text. For file-based word counting, use the Bytario API which accepts document uploads and returns structured text statistics.