Count words, characters, sentences and paragraphs, estimate reading time, and score readability - with true character-based counting for Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Thai text.
Nothing you paste is stored - it is counted and returned in the same request, never written to disk, a database, a cache or a log.
Paste in an essay, an article, a caption or a script and get an instant count - words, characters, sentences, paragraphs and estimated reading time - plus a readability score built from the same formulas writers and editors already use. Nothing you paste is stored: it is counted and handed back in the same request.
A "word count" assumes words are separated by spaces, which is true for English and most European languages but not for Chinese, Japanese or Thai, where text runs together with no spaces between words. Counting those scripts by splitting on whitespace would return a meaningless number, often just 1, the whole passage as a single "word". Korean does use spaces, but between units that bundle a word with its particles, so a space count is not comparable to an English word count either. This tool instead looks at the pasted text itself: when more than 30% of its non-space characters fall in those scripts' character ranges, it reports a character count instead of a word count, and skips the readability scores, which are built on an English sentence structure that does not apply. This is based on the text you paste, not the site's display language, so pasting English into a Hindi-language page - or Chinese into an English one - still gets the right kind of count.
Flesch Reading Ease scores from roughly 0 to 100: higher means easier to read, with 60-70 considered plain English and above 90 very easy. Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level estimates the US school grade a reader would need to follow the text on a first read. Both come from the words-per-sentence and syllables-per-word in what you pasted, using the published Flesch formulas, not a model's opinion of your writing. Syllables are estimated by counting vowel groups in English letters, and both formulas were calibrated on English, so for French, German, Spanish or other languages written with spaces the scores are only a rough guide. A word with no English letters at all, such as a word in Russian, Arabic, Persian, Hindi or Bengali script, counts as zero syllables, so for text in those scripts the scores are not meaningful.
For space-separated text, a word is anything between spaces or line breaks, so e-mail, don't and 3.5 each count as one word, and a dash typed with a space on each side counts as a word too. A sentence ends at a full stop, question mark or exclamation mark, so the dot in a decimal or a web address also splits: "It costs 3.5 dollars." counts as two sentences, and so does "Visit example.com today." Paragraphs are separated by a blank line; a single line break does not start a new one. Characters are counted as Unicode code points, and the count with spaces includes line breaks. Some emoji are built from several code points (a family of four is 7), so a site with its own counting rule, such as a social network post limit, may show a different number.
No. The text is counted and the result is returned in the same request - nothing is written to disk, a database, a cache or a log.
Flesch Reading Ease and Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level are built on space-separated words and sentences. If more than 30% of your text is Chinese, Japanese, Korean or Thai, the scores do not apply, so they are left out rather than shown as a misleading number. Text with no full stop, question mark or exclamation mark still gets a score, treated as one long sentence, which pushes it toward "hard to read".
From a fixed, commonly used pace of 200 words per minute for space-delimited text, or 200 characters per minute for Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Thai text - a documented approximation, not a measurement of how fast you personally read.
By splitting on full stops, question marks and exclamation marks (a run such as "?!" or "..." counts once). It does not special-case abbreviations, so "e.g." or "Dr." adds sentences, and it does not split on the Chinese and Japanese full stop, so a Chinese or Japanese passage usually shows one sentence.
Up to 50,000 characters at a time, about 8,000 English words. Longer text is refused with a message rather than cut off silently; count it in parts.
LEN(A1) counts characters including spaces and line breaks, like Characters here. Microsoft's word-count formula is =IF(LEN(TRIM(A1))=0,0,LEN(TRIM(A1))-LEN(SUBSTITUTE(A1," ",""))+1), which gives 4 for The car drove fast, as this page does. It treats only ordinary spaces as gaps, so two words on separate lines of one cell (Alt+Enter) count as one word there and two here, and so do two words joined by a non-breaking space copied from a web page. LEN(SUBSTITUTE(A1," ","")) keeps line breaks in, while Characters (no spaces) here leaves out every kind of space. Neither formula works for Chinese, Japanese or Thai, which do not put spaces between words.
In Word, the count is in the status bar at the bottom left; Review > Word Count (Ctrl+Shift+G on Windows) opens the full figures, with a tick box to include text boxes, footnotes and endnotes. In Google Docs, choose Tools > Word count or press Ctrl+Shift+C (Cmd+Shift+C on a Mac), and tick "Display word count while typing" for a live counter. In both, select text first to count only that part. Each program has its own rules for dashes, numbers and links, so its total can differ by a few words from this page, which splits space-separated text on spaces and line breaks only. When a limit is strict, check with the program your client, teacher or publisher will use.
Because the formula has no floor or ceiling, and this page shows the result as calculated: Reading Ease = 206.835 - 1.015 x (words per sentence) - 84.6 x (syllables per word). Short sentences of one-syllable words go above 100: "The cat sat on the mat." (6 words, 1 sentence, 6 syllables) scores 116.1, with a Grade Level of -1.4. One long sentence of long words goes below zero: "Interdepartmental communication necessitates comprehensive organizational documentation." scores -236.4, Grade Level 47.7. Read anything above 100 as very easy and anything below 0 as very hard; whole paragraphs of ordinary prose usually land between 0 and 100.
Check the Characters count, with two caveats. One SMS holds 160 characters of the GSM 7-bit alphabet (3GPP TS 23.038), but a single character outside it, such as an emoji, a curly quote pasted from Word, or Hindi, Arabic or Chinese script, switches the whole message to UCS-2, which holds 70. A longer message is sent in parts that each carry a joining header, so each part usually holds 153 GSM characters or 67 UCS-2 characters. Some GSM characters (€ [ ] { } ~ ^ | \) take two places, and many emoji take two UCS-2 places, while this page counts each as one, so leave a few characters of margin near a limit.