Word Counter

How to use it

1. Type or paste your text above. The counts update as you write.
2. Compare Words, Characters and Without spaces with your requirement. Set an optional word or character goal to track your progress.
3. Use Copy counts for the summary or Copy text to keep your draft. Copy anything you need before Reset clears the text and goal.

What counts as a word?

Letters and numbers count as words; punctuation and emoji alone do not. Internal apostrophes and hyphens stay together: don't or well-known each count as one, as do 10,000, 10.50, a URL or an email address. English and German use their own language rules. Editors can differ; for a strict submission limit, use the required platform's count.

Compare the counts on real examples

Spaces between items are included. In the last example, the accented e consists of a letter and a combining accent; it counts as one character, as does the joined family emoji. The emoji is not a word.

Which character count does your limit mean?

Characters includes spaces, tabs and line breaks. Without spaces removes all of these, not just ordinary spaces. A Windows line break counts as one character. If an assignment specifies characters including spaces, use Characters; the optional character goal uses this total too.

Why another editor may show a different number

E-Mail and don't each count as one word here; 3/4 counts as two. An editor can choose different boundaries. Compare exactly the same selected text, including headings, footnotes and captions. Copying from a PDF can introduce line breaks or split a word at a line-end hyphen. Review those changes before comparing counts.

Blank lines separate paragraphs. Lines counts entered line breaks, not the way text wraps on your screen. Sentence detection handles common English and German abbreviations but is an estimate, not a grammar check. Reading time assumes 200 words per minute; unfamiliar material can take longer. Older browsers use a fallback that can differ for less common writing systems.

Count words from a PDF or a scan

This counter accepts pasted text. Choose the extraction step that fits the source, then return here with the reviewed text:

1. For a PDF with selectable text, extract and review the reading order with Copy PDF text with readable paragraphs. Check columns, repeated headers and words split across lines before copying the text here.
2. For a scanned PDF, first recognize its text with Make scanned PDF searchable. Review recognition errors and extract the resulting text before counting. OCR can miss words or mistake letters and numbers; the count describes the extracted text, not an independently verified page.

Details & limits

Text is counted on your device and is not saved automatically. Paste up to 100,000 simple characters, fewer with emoji; split longer documents into sections. Copy text you want to keep before resetting or leaving the page.