Free Online Word Counter

What is a word counter?

A word counter tells you how long a piece of writing is. Paste or type your text and WrittenCheck's word counter shows the number of words, characters with and without spaces, sentences and paragraphs right away, along with how long it takes to read or say out loud and how many pages it fills.

It's built for the jobs people actually count words for: essays and assignments with a word limit, college and job applications, blog posts, speeches, social media posts and translations priced per word.

What the word counter counts

How to use the word counter

1. Add your text. Type, paste, or open a Word (.docx), PDF, ODT, RTF or text file. You can also drop a file onto the box.
2. Read the counts. Everything updates as you type. Select part of your text to count just that part.
3. Check the pages. Open Pages and pick a font, size, line spacing and paper size to match your assignment.
4. Copy or download a summary of the counts for your notes or your teacher.

How many pages is 1,000 words?

The figures below come from laying out real paragraphs in each font, not from a rule of thumb. You'll often read that a page holds 500 words single spaced. That's a safe guess for pages with headings, lists, quotes and short paragraphs. A page of plain paragraphs holds more, about 700 words in Times New Roman 12 pt.

Times New Roman 12 pt, Letter paper, 1 inch margins, no extra space between paragraphs, paragraphs of about 150 words.

How many words is a page?

It depends on the font, the size and the line spacing. With 1 inch margins on Letter paper and plain paragraphs:

A4 paper is a little narrower and longer than Letter, so it holds about 5% more. Word's default of 8 pt after each paragraph takes off a few lines per page. Set these in Pages and the counter works it out for your own text.

How long does it take to read 1,000 words?

Everyone reads at their own pace, and hard or technical text is slower. If you know your speed, type it under Reading and speaking speed and every time on the page uses it.

How many words is a 5-minute speech?

About 900 words at a comfortable 180 words a minute. A 1-minute speech is about 180 words, a 3-minute speech about 550, a 10-minute speech about 1,800 and a 20-minute talk about 3,600. Leave room for pauses and applause, and read it aloud with a timer once: the speaking time in the counter is a starting point, not your own pace.

The Speech view has that timer built in. Press Start and read aloud: it shows how far into your text you should be at your speaking speed, so you can tell straight away if you're rushing or running long. Type a number of minutes and it tells you how many words to write.

Character counter with and without spaces

Some limits count characters, not words. Application forms, SMS messages, social posts, page titles and meta descriptions are the usual ones. The counter shows characters with spaces and without spaces, and the Limits view tracks the common ones as you type:

• X: 280 characters for most accounts. Links count as 23 characters, and Chinese, Japanese, Korean and emoji count as 2, so the counter uses the same rules.
• Bluesky: 300 characters. Threads: 500. Mastodon: 500 on most servers.
• Instagram caption: 2,200. LinkedIn post: 3,000.
• YouTube: 100 for a title and 5,000 for a description.
• Google: titles over about 60 characters and descriptions over about 160 are often cut off in search results.
• SMS: 160 characters in one message, or 70 if it has an emoji or a non-Latin letter. Longer texts are split into parts.

As a rough guide, 500 English words is about 3,000 characters with spaces and about 2,500 without.

Split a long post into a thread

Too long for one post? Under Limits, Split into posts cuts your text into a thread for X, Threads, Bluesky or Mastodon. Each post stays under the limit, sentences are kept whole wherever they fit, and the posts can be numbered 1/5, 2/5 and so on. Copy them one at a time, or all at once.

Keyword density

The Keywords view lists the words and phrases you use most, how many times each appears and what share of all your words it makes up. Writers use it to spot a word they lean on too often. Bloggers use it to check that a page is clearly about its topic without repeating a phrase so often it reads badly. Common words like "the" and "and" are hidden unless you want them.

Tap any word or phrase in the list and every place it appears lights up in your text. Highlight long sentences, under More details, marks every sentence of 25 words or more, which are the first ones to split when you edit.

What counts toward a word limit

Teachers and journals don't all count the same things. Many leave out the reference list, and some leave out in-text citations and quotations too. Open Count options and tick what your assignment leaves out: numbers, quotes, citations such as (Smith, 2020) or [3], or everything from a "References", "Bibliography" or "Works Cited" heading on. The counts and reading time update straight away, and a note under your text reminds you what's left out. If you're not sure what your word limit includes, ask: it's a fair question.

Counting words in other languages

The counter works in every language we support, and each one is counted the way native writers expect:

• Chinese and Japanese are counted by characters, and each character also counts as one word, as in Word.
• Korean counts the words between spaces, with characters with and without spaces.
• Thai has no spaces between words, so the counter uses your browser's Thai dictionary to find them.
• Arabic, Urdu, Hindi, Russian and the rest are counted between spaces, and sentences end at their own punctuation, like ؟, । and ۔.

Word count in Word, Google Docs and PDFs

Microsoft Word shows the word count in the status bar, and Google Docs has it under Tools, then Word count. Both count words much the way this counter does, so the numbers should match closely. Small differences usually come from footnotes, text boxes, headers or captions, which some tools include and others don't.

PDFs don't show a word count at all. Open the PDF here and the counter reads the text out of it in your browser. Scanned PDFs that are just pictures of pages have no text to read.

Your text stays private

Everything happens in your browser. Your text isn't sent to our server or anyone else's, and it isn't saved. Files you open are read on your own device. The page remembers your settings, such as your font and reading speed, in your own browser. If you turn on Keep my text in this browser, your text is kept there too, so it's still there when you come back. It never leaves your device, and turning the option off deletes it.

Want to know if a text reads like AI? Our free AI detector checks it in a few seconds.

Common questions

Sources

• Brysbaert, M. (2019). How many words do we read per minute? A review and meta-analysis of reading rate. Journal of Memory and Language, 109, 104047.
• Trauzettel-Klosinski, S., Dietz, K., and the IReST Study Group (2012). Standardized assessment of reading performance: the new International Reading Speed Texts IReST. Investigative Ophthalmology & Visual Science, 53(9), 5452-5461.
• Character limits from each platform's help pages, checked in November 2026.

Last updated 4 November 2026.