Word & Character Counter
Count words, characters, sentences and paragraphs, with reading and speaking time estimates.
About Word & Character Counter
Word count is the number of whitespace-separated tokens, which is the same convention word processors and most publishing style guides use. Reading and speaking times divide that count by a words-per-minute rate: around 238 wpm for adult silent reading of English prose, and 130-150 wpm for a comfortable spoken delivery. Sentence and paragraph counts are heuristics — sentences are detected at runs of . ! ? followed by whitespace or end of text, and paragraphs at blank lines — so abbreviations and decimal numbers can shift the sentence count slightly. Average word and sentence length are useful readability proxies: long sentences paired with long words are the usual cause of dense, hard-to-scan copy.
Formulas
Reading time
reading_minutes = word_count / reading_wpm
- W
- Word count
- R
- Reading speed in words per minute
Speaking time
speaking_minutes = word_count / speaking_wpm
- W
- Word count
- S
- Speaking speed in words per minute
Average sentence length
avg_sentence_length = word_count / sentence_count
- W
- Word count
- sentence_count
- Number of detected sentences
Worked example
With the default values below, Word & Character Counter returns Words of 24. Change any input above and every figure here is recalculated in your browser.
Inputs used
- Text
- Calcrivo runs every calculation in your browser. Nothing you type is uploaded, so you can paste a draft here and get its length instantly.
- Reading Speedaccepts 50–1,000 wpm
- 238 wpm
- Speaking Speedaccepts 50–400 wpm
- 140 wpm
Results
- Words
- 24
- Characters (with spaces)
- 138
- Characters (no spaces)
- 115
- Sentences
- 2
- Paragraphs
- 1
- Lines
- 1
- Reading Time
- 6m
- Speaking Time
- 10m
- Average Word Length
- 4.79 chars
- Average Sentence Length
- 12.00 words
Step by step
- 1Words= 24 words
- 2Characters= 138 characters
- 3Reading time= 6 seconds
- 4Speaking time= 10 seconds
Assumptions and limits
- The result is derived only from the 3 inputs listed above. Anything not among them is not part of the calculation.
- In particular, this calculator does not take inflation, tax, fees or charges or compounding frequency into account.
- Figures are rounded for display to 2 decimal places, so totals built from several rounded parts can differ slightly from the unrounded arithmetic.
How these calculators are built and tested is described on the Methodology page. If a figure looks wrong, please report it.
Frequently Asked Questions
Does the character count include spaces and line breaks?
Both figures are shown. The 'with spaces' count is the raw string length including spaces and newlines, which is the limit most platforms enforce; the 'no spaces' count strips all whitespace.
Why does my sentence count look slightly off?
Sentence detection is a heuristic based on . ! ? followed by whitespace. Abbreviations such as 'e.g.' and decimal numbers can create false boundaries, and a sentence ending without punctuation will be merged with the next one.
What reading speed should I use?
238 words per minute is the meta-analysis average for adult silent reading of English non-fiction. Use 150-180 for technical or unfamiliar material and 300+ for skimming familiar content.
Is my text uploaded anywhere?
No. The counting runs entirely in your browser, and the text field is marked ephemeral so it is deliberately excluded from shareable result links.