Count words, characters, sentences and paragraphs, with reading and speaking time estimates.
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.
Reading time
reading_minutes = word_count / reading_wpm
Speaking time
speaking_minutes = word_count / speaking_wpm
Average sentence length
avg_sentence_length = word_count / sentence_count
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.
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.
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.
No. The counting runs entirely in your browser, and the text field is marked ephemeral so it is deliberately excluded from shareable result links.