Word & Character Counter

Count words, characters, sentences, and paragraphs in any text instantly.

How to Use Word & Character Counter

1

Paste your text

Enter the text you want to count words and characters for.
2

View the counts

See word count, character count, sentence count, and paragraph count.
3

Check limits

Verify your text fits within platform or assignment requirements.

Tested tool guide Text and writing tools Checked August 16, 2026

What Word & Character Counter does, with a checked example

Paste anything - a tweet draft, a term paper, a job application - and this tool reports how many words, characters, sentences, and paragraphs it holds. The counts recalculate as the text changes, so it doubles as a live gauge while you edit. Everything runs in the browser, so the text never leaves your machine. Most people are surprised by the character figure, which appears twice: once counting spaces and once ignoring them - a gap that grows with every space you type and can reach hundreds on a long page.

Worked example

A concrete input and expected output from the current implementation.

Input

Don't count words by hand. The tool does it instantly.

Expected output

10 words, 54 characters (including spaces), 45 characters (excluding spaces), 2 sentences, 1 paragraph.

The apostrophe does not split a word, so "Don't" is one of the ten; the two periods produce two sentences; with no blank line the whole text counts as one paragraph. Excluding spaces removes the nine spaces, bringing 54 down to 45.

How the result is produced

The word rule

A word is any run of characters between separators - spaces, tabs, and line breaks all count, and several in a row count as one. Apostrophes and hyphens do not split, so "don't" and "well-known" are one word each, and "e.g." stays whole despite its periods. Digits count too: "2026" is a word. Languages written without spaces, like Chinese and Japanese, register as a single long word.

Where the other numbers come from

Character count is the raw length of the text: letters, digits, punctuation, spaces, and pasted line breaks all count, which is why the with-spaces and without-spaces figures drift apart. Sentence count splits on the classic end marks - period, exclamation point, question mark - so abbreviations like "Mr." or "U.S." can register a false sentence boundary. Paragraph count splits on blank lines, so single line breaks inside pasted text can inflate it.

Good uses

Meeting a hard limit: a 500-word essay prompt, a 280-character post, a form field capped at 160 characters - check the draft before submitting.
Copy destined for ad platforms, SMS, meta descriptions, or CMS fields, where exceeding the cap means the text is truncated or rejected outright.
Settling a length question: comparing two versions of a paragraph, proving a rewrite is actually shorter, or confirming delivered copy hits the word count a brief specified.

Limits and checks

It will not match Microsoft Word exactly: Word counts hyphenated compounds like "well-known" as two words, while whitespace-based counting treats them as one. Expect a word or two of difference on ordinary prose and more on hyphen-heavy or technical writing.
The with-spaces character count includes every space and punctuation mark. If the limit you are targeting excludes spaces - many CMS and form fields count that way - use the without-spaces figure, or you will cut text you never needed to cut.
Sentence and paragraph counts are inferred from punctuation and blank lines, not true grammar. "Mr. Smith" adds a phantom sentence, "v1.2.3" can do the same, and a single line break does not create a new paragraph, so pasted text can split differently than you expect.

Common questions

Why do the two character counts differ so much?

Spaces are characters like any other, and ordinary English runs roughly one space per five or six characters, so the with-spaces total sits about 15 to 20 percent higher. Different destinations count differently - Word, tweet boxes, and CMS fields each have their own rules - so check which figure the limit applies to before trimming.

I pasted Chinese text and it reports one word. Is something broken?

No. Words are runs of characters between spaces, and Chinese, Japanese, and Thai are written without spaces, so the whole passage is a single run - and the character counts are still correct, which is what matters for those scripts. Proper word segmentation for space-less languages follows standards like Unicode word boundaries, which most counters do not apply.

References and verification

The example and behavioral notes were checked against the browser implementation. Standards and primary references below define the relevant format, formula, or platform behavior.