Word Counter
Count the number of words in a piece of text.
Word count will appear here.
What This Tool Does
Word counts matter for essays with a minimum length, articles with a target range, or just knowing whether something you wrote is actually as long as it feels. Paste your text in and this tool returns the word count instantly, no matter how long the text is.
How to Use It
Paste or type your text into the box and click Count Words. The result states the count as a plain sentence. There's no upper limit on input length — full articles and essays work exactly the same as a single short sentence.
The Formula
The tool trims whitespace from the start and end of your text, then splits what remains wherever one or more whitespace characters appear — spaces, tabs, or line breaks all count as separators — and counts the resulting pieces. Anything that isn't whitespace counts as part of a word, which means numbers, standalone punctuation, and hyphenated terms are all counted the same way a plain word would be: as one unit, separated from its neighbors by whitespace rather than by what kind of characters it actually contains.
A Worked Example
"The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog." splits into 9 pieces at the whitespace between them — The, quick, brown, fox, jumps, over, the, lazy, and dog. (the trailing period stays attached to "dog" since it isn't whitespace) — giving a word count of 9. Add a number into the mix, like "I have 3 cats," and that becomes 4 words, since "3" is just as much a whitespace-separated unit as any of the surrounding text.
FAQ
- How are words counted?
- Words are separated by whitespace (spaces, tabs, newlines). The tool trims leading and trailing whitespace before counting.
- Does it count numbers as words?
- Yes, any sequence of non-whitespace characters separated by spaces is counted as a word, including numbers.