📝 Word Counter
Paste or type your text to see live word, character, sentence, and paragraph counts, plus how long the piece takes to read and to read aloud — everything updates instantly, right in your browser.
📊 Count Your Text
📊 Live Text Stats
Words are counted on whitespace; reading time assumes 200 words per minute and speaking time 130 — adjust for your own pace.
What is a Word Counter?
A word counter tallies the building blocks of your writing — words, characters, sentences, and paragraphs — so you can hit a target length, respect an editor's brief, or trim a piece down to size. It's the everyday companion for essays, blog posts, product copy, cover letters, and social captions.
DocBetter's counter also estimates reading and speaking time, which is invaluable when you're writing a script, a speech, or an article and need to know whether it fits the slot. Everything is computed locally as you type, so it's fast, private, and works offline once the page has loaded.
❓ Frequently Asked Questions
How does the word counter count words?
It splits your text on whitespace — every run of spaces, tabs, or line breaks — and counts the non-empty chunks between them. That matches how most word processors and editors count, so a hyphenated compound like 'well-known' counts as one word while 'up to date' counts as three.
What's the difference between characters with and without spaces?
Characters counts what a reader sees, including spaces, tabs and line breaks, so an emoji with a skin tone is one character even though it is four code units inside the computer. Characters without spaces strips all whitespace first. X and SMS each count their own way (X weighs links, emoji and many non-Latin characters differently, and an SMS is billed in segments), so use the Character Counter for those.
How is reading and speaking time estimated?
Reading time assumes an average silent reading speed of 200 words per minute, and speaking time assumes 130 words per minute — a comfortable presentation pace. These are averages: skim-readers go faster and careful readers slower, so treat the figures as a planning guide rather than a stopwatch.
Does anything I paste get sent to a server?
No. The counter runs entirely in your browser and recalculates as you type, so your draft never leaves your device. That makes it safe for confidential documents, contracts, and anything you'd rather not upload.