Text Tools — word counter and speed reading
Count words and characters, or train yourself to read faster. Both tools work in the browser and send nothing anywhere.
Words are counted more often than they are read: essays have limits, ads have caps, forms have maximums. This page gathers the site's text tools, with the word counter doing most of the daily work.
Tools in this section
Other sections
How to use Text
Pick the tool that matches the job — for most visitors that is counting words and characters. Paste your text; nothing needs saving or uploading first. Read the numbers, trim or expand, and paste the result back where it came from.
Where a word counter earns its keep
Almost every piece of writing that leaves your keyboard is judged by length before it is judged by content. A word counter answers the length question instantly, which matters because most writing software answers it badly or not at all: chat boxes, web forms, and comment fields count nothing, and that is precisely where limits bite. Checking here before submitting beats discovering the cap after the rejection.
Limits you meet every day
School and university assignments, where both too short and too long lose marks. Application forms and cover letters with strict maximums. Ad platforms and social networks that cut text mid-sentence at their cap.
Search snippets, which truncate long descriptions and take your best line with them. Anything paid by the word, where the count is literally the invoice. Every writing limit feels unfair until you meet a text that should have respected one.
Why count in the browser at all
A desktop word processor counts too — when the text is in the word processor. Writing today happens in browser tabs, message windows, and content forms, and an online word counter meets the text where it already is: copy, paste, number. There is no license and no download, which is what people mean when they search for a free word counter and hope the word "free" survives the click.
Working with text you did not write
Text arriving from elsewhere is where the edge cases live. It may use a different encoding than you assume, contain line endings from another system, or carry formatting characters from wherever it was copied. The safe sequence is to normalise first, then process: settle the encoding, settle the line endings, strip what should not be there, and only then do the actual work.
Doing it the other way around — processing first and cleaning up afterwards — means the mess propagates into whatever you produce, and finding it later is considerably harder than preventing it now.
Questions and answers
- What is the difference between this page and the counter itself?
- This is the hub for text tools; the full word and character counter lives on its own page with the complete set of counts. Start here if you are not sure what you need.
- Is a word counter online accurate for other languages?
- Counting by spaces works for most languages written with them. For languages written without spaces, character counts are the more meaningful number.
- Do words and characters ever disagree?
- Constantly — a limit of 100 words and a limit of 500 characters are very different budgets. Check whichever unit your limit is written in, not the one that flatters your draft.