Everyday math
Count words, characters, sentences, and paragraphs in any text.
Enter your numbers to see the answer.
Word and character counter guide
A word and character counter helps you check the length and structure of text before publishing, submitting, or formatting it. This page counts words, characters, sentences, and paragraphs from the text you type or paste, entirely in your browser, so it is useful for essays, social posts, titles, descriptions, applications, and forms with length limits. Character count can mean characters including spaces or excluding spaces, so check the displayed breakdown rather than assuming the two counts are interchangeable. Words are whitespace-separated groups, sentences end at a period, question mark, or exclamation mark followed by a space or the end of the text, and paragraphs are separated by a blank line. The counts update as you type, and the text is never uploaded to NumberTrove.
Words = whitespace-separated tokens; characters = every Unicode character in the supplied text; characters excluding spaces = characters − whitespace characters; sentences = segments ending in . ! or ? followed by a space or the end; paragraphs = blocks separated by a blank line.
Worked example: the text box starts empty, so paste “Numbers make decisions clearer. Measure twice, then order once.” to test it. The counter shows 9 words, because there are nine whitespace-separated groups. There are 55 non-space characters and 8 spaces, so the character rows read 55 + 8 = 63 characters including spaces and 63 − 8 = 55 excluding spaces. The two periods followed by a space or the end of the text give 2 sentences, and with no blank line the paragraph count is 1. The headline the calculator displays is 9 words.
There is no physical unit to convert. Review both characters including spaces and characters excluding spaces because different forms, platforms, and APIs use different limits. Line breaks count as characters, a single line break does not start a new paragraph (a blank line does), and emoji or accented letters count as one character each because the page counts Unicode code points rather than bytes.
Use the count that matches the requirement you are checking. A platform may count emoji, links, punctuation, or line breaks differently, so verify against the destination when the limit is strict. Sentence and paragraph counts are approximations based on punctuation and blank lines.
Do not compare a character limit with a word count, or assume spaces are always included: a 280-character limit and a 50-word limit are different constraints. A hyphenated term such as “well-known” counts as one word here but two in some editors, and abbreviations like “e.g.” can inflate the sentence count because each period followed by a space ends a sentence. Avoid pasting passwords or private data into any browser tool without checking the privacy context, even though this page keeps text local.
Counting runs locally in your browser. The result is a planning check; confirm the destination service’s own counting rules for strict limits.
How it works
Count words, characters, sentences, and paragraphs in any text. This tool explains the calculation so you can adjust the assumptions to match your situation.
Worked example
With → 0 words (words in your text). Change an input above and this example updates with your numbers.
Common questions
Paste the text into the counter to see characters including spaces and excluding spaces, along with words, sentences, and paragraphs. For the sample sentence pair above the counts are 63 and 55 characters respectively.
It depends on the platform, which is why this page shows both figures. Most social networks and form fields count spaces; some academic and typesetting rules quote characters without spaces, so use the row that matches the requirement you are checking.
Words are counted from whitespace-separated text, so punctuation stays attached to the word it follows and a hyphenated compound counts once. Numbers, URLs, and stray symbols separated by spaces are each counted as one word.
No. Counting runs in your browser with a small script, and the text itself is not included in NumberTrove usage events or sent to any server. Closing the tab discards it.
Services can treat spaces, emoji, punctuation, line breaks, links, and compound words differently, and some count bytes rather than characters. Check the destination’s documented rule when accuracy matters, especially for limits enforced at submission.