Text Tools

Count words, and find out what that means

Paste your text and every count updates as you type. Underneath them sit the numbers people are usually really after: how long this takes to read, how long it takes to say out loud, and which words you lean on most.

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Words

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Characters

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Characters

no spaces

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Sentences

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Paragraphs

0

Lines

0 sec

Reading time

silently

0 sec

Speaking time

aloud

  • Runs in your browser
  • No account required
  • Free to use

How it works

01

A word is a run of non-space characters

Which sounds obvious until you try the common shortcut. Splitting on “word characters” breaks “don’t” into two words, counts “state-of-the-art” as four, and drops accented letters entirely — so “l’été n’est” comes back as three words instead of two. Counting runs of anything that is not whitespace matches what you would get pointing at the page with your finger.

02

Characters are counted the way you see them

An emoji is one character here. To JavaScript it is usually two, because the language counts storage units rather than symbols, which is why so many counters report 5 for “hi 👋”. This one counts by code point, so the number matches what you would count yourself.

03

Reading time uses a figure with a source

Most tools assume 200 words per minute, a number that traces back to nothing in particular and consistently over-estimates. This uses 238 wpm, the mean for silent reading of English prose across the 190 studies in Brysbaert’s 2019 meta-analysis. Speaking time uses 150 wpm, which is roughly the pace of an unhurried presentation.

What it does

Every count at once

Words, characters with and without spaces, sentences, paragraphs and lines, all live. No mode to switch, no button to press — the work is a calculation on text already in the page, so making you click something would only add a step.

Reading and speaking time

The first tells you whether a blog post is the ten-minute read you promised. The second is the one that matters for a script or a talk, and the two differ by more than people expect — reading aloud is about 60% of the pace of reading silently.

The words you overuse

A short list of your most repeated words, with “the”, “and” and the rest of the filler left out because they top every list and tell you nothing. It is a fast way to catch a word you have unknowingly used nine times in four paragraphs.

Nothing leaves the page

The text is never uploaded, never logged and never stored. There is no code here that would send it anywhere, which matters if what you are counting is a contract, a cover letter or anything else you would rather not paste into someone’s server.

Practical advice

Getting a better result

  • Sentence counting splits on full stops, question marks and exclamation marks, so an abbreviation like “Dr. Who” counts as two sentences. Getting that right needs a dictionary, and a rule you can predict beats a clever one that is wrong unpredictably.
  • Paragraphs are separated by a blank line. A single line break inside a block of text does not start a new paragraph, which matches how almost every editor treats it.
  • If you are writing to a limit rather than a target, the character counter shows the same text against platform limits like meta descriptions and post lengths.
  • Reading time is an average of readers, not a promise about any one of them. A technical paragraph takes longer than the same word count of plain narrative.

Questions

Things people ask

Is my text uploaded anywhere?

No. Every count is calculated in your browser as you type. Analytics records that the page was opened, never a character of what you type.

Does it count hyphenated words as one or two?

One. “State-of-the-art” is a single run of non-space characters, so it counts as one word — the same answer you get counting by eye, and the same answer Microsoft Word gives.

Why is the reading time different from other tools?

Because most of them use 200 words per minute and this uses 238. The 238 figure is the mean for silent reading of English prose from a 2019 meta-analysis of 190 studies; 200 is a round number with no particular research behind it. On a 2,000-word article that is the difference between claiming ten minutes and eight and a half.

Is there a limit on how much text I can paste?

No fixed limit. Everything runs in your browser, so the practical ceiling is your device’s memory rather than a rule set by us. Documents of tens of thousands of words count instantly.

Who builds these

Free tools by day. Websites that earn their keep by trade.

KuConvert is built by KUDUY, a web design and development agency. From custom WordPress builds to SEO and e-commerce, everything they do is engineered to bring you more qualified traffic and turn it into revenue.

  • Fixed scope, no surprise invoices

    Most sites ship in four to eight weeks with the scope and the price agreed up front.

  • SEO from day one

    Search is designed into the build — structure, schema and Core Web Vitals — not retrofitted.

  • A team, not a ticket queue

    A project manager, a designer and a developer you can actually reach.

Need your whole site to load this fast?

Images are usually the heaviest thing on a page and the easiest win. KUDUY works on site speed, image delivery and Core Web Vitals for teams who would rather not do it by hand.

This tool runs entirely in your browser. Your files are never uploaded.