Word Counter

Type or paste text and every statistic updates as you go. Nothing is transmitted, so this is safe for unpublished drafts, contracts and anything else you would rather not paste into a stranger's server.

Why most word counters are wrong about Chinese

The standard way to count words is to split text on whitespace. That works for English, French and every other language that puts spaces between words. Chinese does not. A three-hundred-character Chinese paragraph contains no spaces at all, so a whitespace-splitting counter reports it as one word.

This is not a rare edge case. It affects anyone writing in Chinese, Japanese or Korean, and it affects bilingual documents doubly — the English half gets counted, the Chinese half effectively does not, and the total is meaningless.

What we count instead

CJK ideographs are counted individually, because in Chinese the character is the unit people mean when they say "字數". Western words are counted by the conventional whitespace-and-punctuation rule. The headline number is the sum of the two, which is what a bilingual document actually amounts to.

Both numbers are also shown separately, because a translator quoting per source character and an editor working to an English word limit need different figures from the same text.

Reading time, calculated per script

Reading speed differs between writing systems. We estimate Chinese at around three hundred characters per minute and Western text at around two hundred and twenty words per minute, then add the two.

A single blended rate would be wrong for any document that is not entirely one language. These are averages for adult silent reading of general prose; technical material is slower and light fiction is faster, so treat the figure as a planning aid rather than a measurement.

The privacy problem nobody mentions

Word counters get used on the most sensitive text people write: unpublished manuscripts, job applications, legal drafts, medical letters, academic work before submission. Almost every online counter posts that text to a server to count it.

This one does the counting in JavaScript inside your browser. There is no request to intercept, no server log to worry about, and no terms of service that quietly claim a licence to what you pasted. Open DevTools, watch the Network tab, and type — nothing goes anywhere.

What the other figures mean

Characters with and without spaces are both given because different institutions specify different ones — publishing contracts and translation quotes frequently use characters excluding spaces.

Sentences are detected by terminal punctuation in both Latin and CJK forms, so 。！？ are recognised alongside full stops. Paragraphs are blocks separated by a blank line, which matches how people actually structure documents, rather than counting every line break.