Word counter: count your words and characters, and see how much room is left

What it counts, and how

• A word is a run of characters with no space in it that has at least one letter or digit. don’t, well-known, 3.50 and an email address are one word each. A dash standing alone is not a word.
• A character is one letter, digit, space, mark or line break. A line break counts as one. Some emoji, flags and accented letters are built from several pieces, and each piece is counted.
• Characters, not counting spaces leaves out spaces, tabs and line breaks.
• A sentence ends at a period, an exclamation mark, a question mark or three dots (…) when a space or the end of the line comes next. The end of a line ends a sentence too, so a heading counts as one.
• A paragraph is a line with at least one word in it: what you wrote before pressing Enter. Empty lines are not counted.
• The longest sentence is shown with its number of words and how it begins, in case you want to break it in two.

Where its count can be off

• It does not know abbreviations. For this page Dr. Lee came. is two sentences, because a period and a space come after Dr. A number such as 3.50 is not split.
• It finds words by the spaces between them. Writing that puts no spaces between words gets a wrong word count here.
• The form you are writing for may count another way. It may count a line break as two characters, an emoji as two or more, or two words joined by a hyphen as two. This page has read no form’s rules and cannot see how yours counts.
• When the limit is tight, leave a little room and try your words in the form itself before the day they are due.

The limit, and reading aloud

• The limit is yours to write: a whole number from 1 to 1,000,000, counted in characters or in words.
• Under the limit, the page says how many are left. Over it, the page says how many over, shows the last few characters that fit and the first that do not, and puts the part that fits in a box of its own to select and copy.
• The page cuts at the limit and looks at nothing else. It can cut in the middle of a word or of a thought. It does not shorten your writing for you.
• Reading aloud: the page divides your words by the words a minute you give it, from 40 to 400, and rounds up to a whole second. It starts at 130 only so that the box is not empty. Nobody speaks at one even pace, so leave room.

What this page does not do

• It does not check spelling or grammar, and it does not say whether the writing is good, clear or long enough.
• It does not change your words. The box with the part that fits is a copy; what you wrote stays as it is.
• It does not keep anything. If the page is closed or loaded again, the words are gone. Write somewhere that keeps them and paste here to count.
• It does not know how a phone company splits a long text message, or what any form, school, court or agency accepts.
• It was tried in one browser only (Chromium).

Every time the page is built, a program checks it three ways. It checks 24 examples worked by hand. Then it makes up 3,000 texts out of letters of several alphabets, digits, marks, emoji and every kind of space and line break; a second counter, written separately and in another way, counts each one again, and the build stops if the two differ on anything. For each of those texts it also tries a limit in characters and a limit in words, and checks that the part that fits is the beginning of the text and holds exactly the limit. Last, it counts one text of 100,000 words.