Word Counter — Free Online Word & Character Count

Words are counted by splitting the text on whitespace. Punctuation attached to a word (a trailing comma or period) is not treated as a separate word. An empty textarea returns 0 words.

Character count with spaces includes every character in the text, including spaces, tabs, and newlines. Character count without spaces excludes all whitespace. The without-spaces count is useful for platforms that count printable characters only, such as some SMS gateways and document processors.

Reading time is estimated by dividing the word count by 200 — the commonly cited average adult reading speed in words per minute. The result is rounded to the nearest half-minute. Short texts show "< 1 min".

The tool strips punctuation, lowercases all words, removes common English stop words (like "the", "and", "is"), and filters out words shorter than 4 characters. The remaining words are ranked by frequency and the top 5 are shown with their occurrence count.

No. All counting happens in your browser using JavaScript. Your text is never uploaded or stored. You can use this tool with confidential drafts, client documents, or private content without any privacy risk.

There is no hard limit. The counter handles long documents — blog posts, essays, reports — in real time. Very large texts (above a few hundred thousand characters) may take a fraction of a second to process depending on your device speed.