SumWord Counter
Paste or type your text below and get live counts for words, characters, sentences, and paragraphs — plus estimated reading and speaking times. Free, instant, and private: your text never leaves your browser.
Words
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How It Works
Our word counter scans your text the moment you type or paste it. Words are counted by splitting the text on spaces, tabs, and line breaks, so a phrase like “The quick brown fox” counts as four words. Characters are reported two ways: with spaces (every character you typed, including spaces and line breaks) and without spaces, which is the count most editors and publishers ask for. Sentences are detected by looking for sentence-ending punctuation — periods, exclamation marks, and question marks — and paragraphs are counted by blank lines between blocks of text.
Reading time is estimated at 200 words per minute, the average reading speed for an adult reading English silently. Speaking time uses 130 words per minute, a typical pace for presentations and voiceovers. These are estimates, not exact measurements — dense or technical writing takes longer to read aloud — but they are close enough to plan a blog post, a speech, or a video script. For example, a 600-word article takes about 3 minutes to read and roughly 4 minutes 37 seconds to speak aloud.
Writers, students, teachers, and marketers use this tool every day: students checking an essay against a word limit, bloggers aiming for a target post length, social media managers fitting a caption into a character limit, and job seekers keeping a resume summary tight. Because the counting happens entirely in your browser, your text is never sent to a server, so you can safely paste drafts, homework, or private notes.
Frequently Asked Questions
How are words counted?
Words are groups of characters separated by spaces, tabs, or line breaks. Numbers, hyphenated words, and words with apostrophes each count as one word — for example, “well-known” and “don’t” are each a single word.
What is the difference between characters with and without spaces?
Characters with spaces counts every character you typed, including spaces and line breaks. Characters without spaces strips out all whitespace first. Many editors, translators, and publishers use the without-spaces count to measure text length.
How is reading time calculated?
Reading time divides your word count by 200 words per minute, the commonly used average adult reading speed. Speaking time divides by 130 words per minute, a typical presentation pace. Both are estimates and vary with the difficulty of the text.
Is my text private?
Yes. All counting runs in your browser with JavaScript. Your text is never uploaded, stored, or shared with anyone.
Does it count words in pasted documents?
Yes — paste text from Word, Google Docs, a PDF, or anywhere else and the counts update instantly. Formatting is ignored; only the text itself is counted.
Last updated: November 2026