Any text
Paste it into the Word Counter. It shows words, characters with and without spaces, sentences, paragraphs and reading time as you type. Nothing is uploaded.
Google Docs
Choose Tools → Word count, or press Ctrl+Shift+C (Cmd+Shift+C on a Mac). Tick Display word count while typing to keep a live count on screen.
Microsoft Word
The word count is in the status bar at the bottom of the window. Click it, or choose Review → Word Count, for characters and paragraphs too. Select part of the text to count just that part.
A PDF
Drop the PDF into PDF to Text. It extracts the text and shows the number of words, which you can also paste into the Word Counter for the full breakdown.
How long is that?
- About 500 words fill a single-spaced page; 250 fill a double-spaced one.
- Silent reading runs at roughly 200–250 words per minute.
- Speaking aloud is slower, around 130–150 words per minute, which matters for speeches and videos.
Why programs give different counts
- Hyphens and dashes. "Well-known" is one word to most counters. Two words joined by a dash with no spaces around it may count as one.
- Numbers, links and symbols. "3.5", a web address or a lone "&" count as words in some programs and not in others.
- Footnotes, headers and text boxes. Word processors may leave them out of the main count unless you ask for them.
- Chinese, Japanese and Korean. Chinese and Japanese are written without spaces, so their length is measured in characters, not words.
When a teacher, publisher or form sets a limit, count with the tool they use, or stay a little under.
Character limits
- A text message (SMS) holds 160 characters, or 70 when it contains an emoji or letters outside the basic Latin set. Longer messages are split into parts.
- Search results show roughly the first 155 characters of a page description.