Word Counter — words, characters, and reading time

The counter runs four independent passes over your text. Each pass is a pure function with no side effects, deterministic for a given input, and Unicode-aware so it works for Sinhala, Tamil, CJK, and emoji alongside Latin text.

1. Words. Trim the input and split on any run of whitespace ( /\s+/). The resulting array length is the word count. A second pass uses /\S+/g to match contiguous non-whitespace runs; when the two methods agree, the "verified" badge lights up. Both methods match Microsoft Word and Google Docs for typical input.
2. Characters. Two numbers are reported: total characters ( text.length, UTF-16 code units, matching X/Twitter and SMS counters) and characters without spaces. Code-point versus code-unit counting is a common source of disagreement between counters; this tool uses code units because every major social platform does the same.
3. Sentences. Split on /[.!?。！？]+/ (Latin and CJK terminators) and keep the pieces that contain at least one letter or digit. Abbreviations like "Mr." will be counted as sentence ends — this matches how basic word processors behave and is fast enough to run on every keystroke.
4. Paragraphs. Split on one-or-more blank lines (/\n\s*\n+/) and count non-empty trimmed pieces. Single-line text counts as one paragraph. Lines (any newline) are reported separately.

Reading timeuses 200 words per minute, the conservative anchor that platforms like Medium and WordPress use. Recent research — Brysbaert (2019), "How many words do we read per minute?", Journal of Memory and Language 109 — puts the adult silent-reading rate for English non-fiction higher, at 238 WPM. The tool shows the conservative number so results stay comparable with other platforms; for a personal estimate, divide by 1.19 to get the research-based figure.

Speaking time uses 130 words per minute, the slow narration rate published by the National Center for Voice and Speech. For conversational speech use ~150 WPM; for audiobook narration, 150–160 WPM. The tool defaults to the slowest rate so speech-prep estimates have a safety margin.

Everything runs client-side. There is no fetch, no localStorage write of text, and no analytics event tied to content. You can put a draft legal document or unreleased manuscript into the counter without it leaving your machine.

• 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.
• National Center for Voice and Speech — speaking-rate reference data
• Unicode TR-29 — Text Segmentation (word & sentence boundaries)
• Microsoft — Count the number of words in a document (Word reference)

Algorithm and formulas last verified on 2026-05-11. The page is reviewed when a relevant research update lands or when a user reports a mismatch.