Character Counter

How it actually works

A live counter that updates on every keystroke as you paste or type. Characters and characters-without-spaces are string lengths, words come from splitting on runs of whitespace, sentences from counting terminal punctuation, and paragraphs from counting blank-line separated blocks.

It also estimates reading and speaking time by dividing the word total by fixed words-per-minute rates, so the two figures differ only because the assumed speeds differ - reading is assumed much faster than speaking. Every number is recomputed from the current text rather than sampled.

Everything runs in the browser from the textarea content, so a long document is counted without any upload, and the figures describe exactly the text in the box including spaces and line breaks.

What that means for your results

The split rules are ordinary but predictable: whitespace runs collapse so repeated spaces do not inflate the word count, and the same token list feeds every figure, so words, sentences and the time estimates stay internally consistent. Nothing is hidden - what you paste is what is measured.

Where it falls short — honestly

Sentence and paragraph detection is heuristic, so abbreviations like Dr or a decimal number can be read as extra sentences, and quotes or list items are not treated specially. The reading and speaking speeds are fixed assumptions that will not match every person or language, so treat the time figures as ballpark. Text is counted in UTF-16 code units, so an emoji can add more than one character.

A real end-to-end workflow

Paste your final draft, not a working copy, so the count matches what ships; watch characters-without-spaces when a limit excludes them and the plain count when it includes them. For per-word frequency use Keyword Density, and Word Counter adds a unique-word ratio and small text cleanups.