How Count Words Counts

Words

Text is split on whitespace. A piece of text counts as one word when it contains at least one letter or digit, in any alphabet.

• Hyphenated terms (well-known), contractions (don't), numbers (3.14), URLs and email addresses each count as one word.
• Punctuation that stands alone, such as a dash or an ampersand between spaces, is not a word.
• Chinese and Japanese are written without spaces, so every Han character, hiragana and katakana counts as one word. Microsoft Word uses the same convention. A mixed token such as iPhone手机 counts as three words: one Latin run plus two characters.
• Korean, Arabic, Russian, Hindi and other space-separated scripts are counted by whitespace like English.

Known limitation: Thai, Lao, Khmer and Burmese do not put spaces between words and are not segmented, so the word count for those scripts will be too low. Use the character count for them instead.

Characters and letters

• Characters is the length of the text in UTF-16 code units, including spaces and line breaks. This is how browsers and most web forms measure length. Most emoji count as 2, and emoji built from several parts count as more.
• Characters without spaces removes spaces, tabs and line breaks before counting.
• Letters counts Unicode letters only, leaving out digits, punctuation, symbols and whitespace.

Social networks apply their own weighting on top of this. The X character counter follows X's rules, and every platform limit is listed on the character limits page.

Sentences, paragraphs and lines

A sentence ends at a full stop, question mark, exclamation mark or ellipsis, at the full-width marks used in Chinese and Japanese (。！？), at the Arabic question mark (؟) or at the Devanagari danda (।). A line break also ends a sentence. To avoid over-counting:

• A full stop inside a number, version or domain (3.50, v2.1, example.com) is not a boundary.
• Common abbreviations (Dr., Mr., e.g., vs.) and single-letter initials (J. K. Rowling) do not end a sentence.
• An ellipsis or full stop followed by a lowercase letter continues the same sentence.
• Runs such as ?! and closing quotes or brackets stay with the sentence they end.
• A fragment with no letters or digits is not counted as a sentence.

A paragraph is a block of text separated from the next by at least one blank line. Lines is the number of line breaks plus one.

Reading and speaking time

• Reading time is the word count divided by 238 words per minute, the average silent reading rate for adults reading English non-fiction in a meta-analysis of 190 studies (fiction averaged 260, and reading aloud 183).
• Speaking time is the word count divided by 130 words per minute, a typical presentation pace. Public-speaking guidance usually falls between 120 and 150.
• The main counter rounds both up to the next whole minute. The reading time calculator and the words to minutes converter let you change the speed.

Page estimates

Page counts assume 12-point Times New Roman with 1-inch margins on US Letter or A4 paper:

• Single-spaced: about 500 words per page
• 1.5 line spacing: about 333 words per page
• Double-spaced: about 250 words per page
• Handwritten: about 175 words per page

Fonts, headings, images and paragraph spacing all change the real figure, so treat the result as an estimate. The words to pages converter lets you adjust font size and spacing.

Files and privacy

• Text you type, paste or open as a file is analysed in your browser. It is not uploaded to a server.
• PDF, DOCX, EPUB, HTML, Markdown, RTF, CSV and TXT files are converted to plain text first, then counted with the rules above.
• PDFs are read from their text layer. Scanned PDFs that contain only images have no text to count, because the site does not run OCR.
• Headers, footers, footnotes and captions are counted when the file exposes them as text, which is why totals can differ slightly from the word count shown inside Word or a PDF reader.

Keyword frequency

The keyword panel lowercases the text, ignores common stop words in the supported languages, skips words of one or two letters and bare numbers, and ranks what is left by how often it appears.