Word & Character Counter

A surprising number of everyday writing tasks come with a hard number attached: an essay capped at 500 words, a tweet limited to 280 characters, a meta description that gets truncated past roughly 160 characters, a cover letter a recruiter asked to keep under one page. Manually counting any of that is tedious and error-prone, so most people paste their text into an online counter instead — which usually means sending a draft cover letter, an unpublished article, or a client's confidential brief to a server you know nothing about.

This tool never does that. Every character you type is counted by a small piece of JavaScript running directly in your browser, and the numbers update live as you type — there's no submit button because there's no server round-trip to wait for. Nothing you write is ever sent anywhere, stored, or logged; refresh the page and it's gone, exactly as you'd expect from a scratchpad.

Just start typing or paste your text into the box. Word count splits on whitespace, so "well-known" counts as one word while "well known" counts as two. Sentence count looks for text ending in a period, question mark, or exclamation point, which works well for normal prose but can undercount text that skips punctuation, like a list of bullet points. Paragraph count treats any block of text separated by a blank line as one paragraph. The estimated reading time assumes an average adult reading speed of about 200 words per minute, rounded up to the nearest minute so very short texts still show "1 min read" instead of "0". The same word count also drives an estimated speaking time, based on an average presentation pace of about 130 words per minute — handy for timing a speech or a video voiceover without reading it aloud first.

Writers use this to hit an assignment's word count without guessing, marketers use it to keep a meta description or ad copy under its display limit, and students use it to check a paper against a professor's minimum or maximum before submitting. The character-count-without-spaces figure is particularly useful for platforms — some social networks and forms — that count characters that way rather than including every space. Below the counts, a keyword density table lists the words that appear most often in your text along with how many times and what percentage of the total they make up — the same kind of check SEO writers use to make sure a target keyword isn't repeated so often it reads as spammy, or so rarely it barely registers. If you need to compare two drafts word by word instead of just counting one, the Text Diff Checker tool handles that with the same local, nothing-uploaded approach.