How this calculator works
Paste or type any text to instantly see its word count, character count (with and without spaces), sentence count, paragraph count, average word length, and estimated reading and speaking time. It is built for checking essays, captions, product descriptions, or anything with a word or character limit.
Word splitting is handled carefully: a hyphenated compound like 'well-known' and a contraction like "don't" each count as a single word, while an em dash used as punctuation between clauses (like this—right here) is treated as a word boundary rather than a joiner. Multiple spaces, tabs, and line breaks between words never inflate the count.
How each count works
Words: runs of letters/numbers, optionally joined internally by a hyphen or apostrophe (contractions and hyphenated compounds count as one word each).Sentences: text split on runs of . ! or ? ; a fragment counts only if it contains at least one letter or number.Paragraphs: chunks of text separated by one or more blank lines (not every single line break).Reading time = words ÷ 238 words per minute. Speaking time = words ÷ 130 words per minute.238 words per minute is the average adult silent non-fiction reading speed from Brysbaert (2019), a meta-analysis of 190 studies. 130 words per minute is a commonly cited average pace for reading text aloud or presenting.
Worked example
- Text: "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog. It's a well-known pangram — a sentence containing every letter of the alphabet at least once."
- Word count: 24 — note that "It's" and "well-known" each count as one word, while the em dash before "a sentence" is a boundary, not a joiner.
- 138 characters including spaces; 114 characters if spaces are removed.
- 2 sentences (split on the two periods), 1 paragraph (no blank line breaks it up), and an average word length of 4.6 characters — 111 total characters across the 24 word tokens (including the apostrophe in "It's" and the hyphen in "well-known") divided by 24, which is a slightly smaller total than the 114-character whitespace-stripped count because that count also includes the two periods and the em dash, which aren't part of any word token.
Frequently asked questions
Does a hyphenated word count as one word or two?
One. "Well-known", "state-of-the-art", and similar hyphenated compounds are treated as single words, matching how most word processors and style guides count them.
Why doesn't an em dash join two words the way a hyphen does?
A hyphen (-) typically joins parts of a single compound word, while an em dash (—) is punctuation that separates clauses, similar to a comma or parenthesis. This calculator treats a hyphen as part of a word and an em dash as a word boundary.
How accurate is the sentence count?
It uses a simple rule: split on periods, exclamation points and question marks. It does not recognize abbreviations like "Dr.", "e.g.", or decimal numbers, so text containing those will show a higher sentence count than a human reader would count.
How are paragraphs counted?
As blocks of text separated by one or more blank lines. If your text has line breaks but no blank lines between them, it is counted as a single paragraph — the same convention used by most online word-count tools.
Where does the reading time estimate on this word counter come from?
It divides the word count above by 238 words per minute, the adult silent-reading average for non-fiction English text from a 2019 meta-analysis by Marc Brysbaert covering 190 studies — a more rigorously sourced figure than the round 200 or 250 wpm numbers often used elsewhere. See the dedicated reading time calculator for a version focused specifically on that estimate.