utility.diy

Word counter

Options
Words
0
Characters
0
Without spaces
0
Sentences
0
Paragraphs
0
Reading time
0:00

Plain-text files (.txt or .md), up to 1 MB. Reading time is an estimate.

How the text counts work

Type or paste text to see the counts update. You can also open a plain-text file from your device. The editor counts what is actually in the text, including paragraph breaks, without trying to interpret document formatting.

Words, sentences and paragraphs

Words use your browser’s language-aware word boundaries. Segments containing only punctuation are not words; numbers can count as words. Hyphenated terms may count as more than one word. Sentence boundaries depend on punctuation and the browser, so abbreviations can affect the result.

Paragraphs = Nonempty text blocks separated by a blank line

  1. Select a page in the language of the text for the closest language-aware segmentation.
  2. A single line break does not start a new paragraph; a blank line does.
  3. Treat sentence counts as a useful estimate, especially for notes and abbreviations.

“Hello, world!” has 2 words and 1 sentence. Two text blocks separated by a blank line count as 2 paragraphs.

Characters and spaces

With browser support, a character is a visible text cluster rather than a JavaScript storage unit. An accented letter or a joined emoji can therefore count as one character. The without-spaces count excludes spaces, tabs and line breaks.

Without spaces = Character clusters excluding whitespace

  1. Spaces and line breaks are included in Characters.
  2. Windows and older Mac line endings are treated as single line breaks.
  3. Older browsers fall back to Unicode code points and show a note; counts can differ.

A family emoji can use several code points but still appear as one character. A letter followed by a combining accent is also counted as one cluster in supported browsers.

Reading time and file limits

Reading time uses the speed you set under Options. It is an estimate, not a measure of comprehension; unfamiliar topics, reading aloud and different languages can change the actual time.

Estimated seconds = Round up (Words × 60 ÷ Words per minute)

  1. Change the speed from 30 to 1,000 words per minute.
  2. Open UTF-8 .txt or .md files up to 1 MB. Markdown syntax is counted as plain text, not rendered.
  3. For responsiveness, input is limited to 200,000 UTF-16 text units; some symbols use several units. Oversized text is retained for editing but is not counted.

At 200 words per minute, 500 words take an estimated 2 minutes and 30 seconds. The time display uses minutes:seconds.