Word Counter

Word counting sounds trivial until you start counting. Does 'well-known' count as one word or two? What about 'don't'? What about '敬愛する'? Different tools count differently, and the differences add up over a long document. We follow a simple, defensible rule: a word is any run of non-whitespace characters. So 'well-known' is one word, 'don't' is one word, and CJK characters without spaces are counted as one word per character.

Reading time is the other commonly-requested metric, and it's also trickier than it looks. The standard '200 words per minute' figure is an average for adult native English speakers reading non-technical prose. Technical content, dense academic prose, and content in a non-native language all read more slowly — sometimes dramatically so. We use 200 wpm as a baseline, but treat the estimate as a rough guide, not a prediction.

For writers working within length constraints — academic essays with strict word limits, journalism with editorial space, marketing copy with character budgets — a reliable counter removes the friction of pasting into Word just to see the count. It also gives you the sentence and paragraph counts, which are useful for assessing density and rhythm.