About word counting
Word count is the most basic text metric and is required for essays, articles, academic submissions and social media posts. Characters without spaces is useful for character-limited fields. Sentences are detected by periods, exclamation marks and question marks followed by a space or end of text.
Reading time uses the average adult reading speed of 200 words per minute. Paragraphs are counted as blocks of text separated by one or more blank lines. All counts update live as you type, making this tool useful for drafting within limits.
How do I count words in a text?
To count words, split the text on whitespace and count the resulting chunks; a text box that is empty or contains only spaces counts as zero words. Example: 'The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.' has 9 words, 44 characters, and an estimated reading time of 1 minute.
Steps to count words and estimate reading time
- Trim leading and trailing whitespace from the text, then split the remainder on any run of spaces, tabs, or line breaks to get the word list.
- Count the entries in that list to get the word count; an empty text box counts as 0 words.
- Count characters by measuring the full text length, then subtract whitespace characters to get the count without spaces.
- Detect sentences by counting periods, exclamation points, and question marks that are followed by a space or the end of the text.
- Divide the word count by 200, the average reading speed, and round up to the nearest whole minute to estimate reading time.
Word count and reading time formulas
Words = count of whitespace-separated chunks · Reading time (min) = ceil(Words / 200)
- Words = groups of non-space characters separated by spaces, tabs, or line breaks
- 200 = average adult silent reading speed, in words per minute
Quick word-count answers
How many words are in 'The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog'?
9 words -- counted by splitting on whitespace.
Does this tool count Chinese/Japanese words the same way as English?
No -- words are counted only by splitting on whitespace; since Chinese/Japanese text is usually written without spaces between words, a whole sentence with no spaces counts as a single 'word' (example: '你好世界' is 4 characters but 1 word). Use the character count instead for CJK text length.
How is reading time estimated?
Word count divided by 200 words per minute, rounded up, minimum 1 minute.
How are sentences counted?
By counting occurrences of .!? followed by a space or the end of the text (example: 'Hello world. How are you? I am fine!' = 3 sentences).
How are paragraphs counted?
Blocks of text separated by one or more blank lines each count as one paragraph.
What's the difference between 'characters' and 'characters without spaces'?
Characters is the total text length; characters without spaces is that length minus the whitespace.
What's the reading time for a 600-word text?
Exactly 3 minutes (600 / 200 = 3).
What's the reading time for a short 50-word text?
The 1-minute minimum is shown -- no matter how short the text, reading time rounds up to at least 1 minute.
Example reading times by word count
| Word count | Estimated reading time |
|---|
| 100 words | 1 min |
| 200 words | 1 min |
| 450 words | 3 min |
| 800 words | 4 min |
| 1,200 words | 6 min |
Frequently asked questions
How is reading time calculated?
Reading time divides the word count by 200, the average adult silent reading speed in words per minute, and rounds up to the next whole minute. A 450-word text is estimated at 450 / 200 = 2.25, rounded up to 3 minutes.
Why does my sentence count show 0?
Sentences are detected by punctuation (period, exclamation point, question mark) followed by a space or the end of the text. If your text has no such punctuation, for example a list of keywords or a heading, the sentence count will show 0.
How are paragraphs counted?
A paragraph is any block of text separated from the next by one or more blank lines. Pressing Enter once within a block keeps it as the same paragraph; a blank line marks a new one.
Does character count include spaces?
The Characters figure includes every character, including spaces and line breaks. The Without spaces figure subtracts all whitespace characters, which is useful for platforms that count only visible characters.
Word, sentence, and paragraph counts use simple pattern matching on whitespace and punctuation; they may differ slightly from tools built for a specific language's grammar, and reading time is only a rough average since actual reading speed varies by reader and content difficulty.
Sources: Unicode Standard Annex #29 - Unicode Text Segmentation (word boundaries)