Word Counter

A word here is any run of characters with whitespace on both sides. The counter splits on spaces, tabs and line breaks and counts the pieces. That simple rule decides most of the edge cases:

• Hyphenated words count once. well-known is 1 word, and so is e-mail.
• Contractions count once. don't is 1 word.
• Numbers, URLs and email addresses count as 1 word each, however long they are.
• A dash with spaces around it counts as a word. yes — no is 3 words, while yes—no with no spaces is 1.
• Emoji standing on their own between spaces count as a word.

Punctuation never splits a word, so end.Start typed without a space is 1 word. If your count looks low, check for missing spaces after full stops.

Paste this two-paragraph note, with an empty line between the paragraphs:

Our team ships on Fridays. Last week we missed the deadline by two days, so this week we are starting early.

If you have a well-known blocker, flag it today. Questions? Ask in the team channel.

Sentences are counted by finding a full stop, question mark or exclamation mark that is followed by a space, a line break or the end of the text. Runs such as ... or ?? count once. Abbreviations fool it: Dr. Smith arrived at 3 p.m. today. is one sentence but counts as 3, because Dr. and p.m. are followed by spaces. A last sentence with no closing punctuation is not counted at all.

Paragraphs need a truly empty line between them. A line that looks blank but holds a space or tab does not separate paragraphs, so pasted text sometimes shows 1 paragraph where you expect several.

Reading time is words ÷ 200, rounded to the nearest minute, with a floor of 1 minute. So 299 words shows 1 min, 300 words shows 2 min, and 500 words shows 3 min. An empty box also shows 1 min, so ignore that figure until you've pasted something.

Because words are found by spaces, languages that don't put spaces between words get a misleading word count. 日本語のテキスト is 8 characters but counts as 1 word, since nothing splits it. For these languages, use the Characters figure instead, which counts each of these common characters as 1.

Emoji are the other surprise. They don't change the word count much, but each one adds 2 or more to the character count. The Character Counter page explains why.

When a word limit matters, decide first what belongs in the count, then paste only that part.

• Leave out titles, headings, captions and reference lists if your brief excludes them. The counter has no way to tell them apart from body text.
• Footnote numbers pasted from a document can stick to the preceding word, which keeps the count the same but adds characters.
• Bullet symbols that arrive as separate characters, such as • followed by a space, each add a word.
• The counts update as you type, so you can trim a draft inside the box and watch the number drop.