Count words the way Word does, in any language.

What counts as a word.

Everything between spaces that holds a letter or a digit is one word, as Microsoft Word counts: “e-mail”, “co-op”, “don't” and “3.5” are one word each, and a dash or a bullet standing alone is none. On ordinary prose this gives the same number as the Unix command wc -w, which the tests check.

Chinese, Japanese and Thai are written without spaces between words, so there the page asks the browser's own word breaker (Intl.Segmenter), which knows the words of those languages. When a text is mostly Chinese or Japanese, the count leads with characters, which is how length is usually given in those languages.

• Count the words in your text
• How many words is a 5-minute speech?
• Characters for X posts and text messages

Sentences, paragraphs and characters.

Sentences are found by the browser's sentence breaker, kept from ending a sentence after shortenings such as Mr., Dr., e.g. and etc. (the list is the one Unicode's CLDR gives for English, with a few everyday ones added). A paragraph is a line with words in it, as Word counts. Characters are counted as you see them: an emoji family or a flag is one character, not the seven or two that some counters give.

Reading and speaking time.

Reading time is worked out at 238 words a minute and speaking time at 183, the averages for adults that a review of 190 studies found (Brysbaert, 2019). Both speeds can be changed under More options. For Chinese and Japanese, reading time comes from characters: 255 a minute for Chinese and 357 for Japanese, from the International Reading Speed Texts.

A word target.

Asked for 500 words? Turn on Check a limit, choose Word target and set the number with the plus and minus buttons. The page says how many words are left, or how many over, as you write. Under More options are the words and phrases you use most, without the common ones such as “the” and “of”.

Nothing leaves your browser.

Everything is worked out on your device: what you paste, type or open is never sent anywhere, and nothing is kept when you leave the page. There are no adverts, no accounts and no limits on length.

• Read what the site keeps