How to Count Words in Any Text

You have a 650-word limit, a draft that says 662 in one program and 655 in another, and a submit button that will not wait. Counting words is easy; agreeing on what a word is turns out to be the hard part. This guide walks through what a counter really measures and how to get a number you can trust.

What a counter is really counting

Most word processors take the shortcut: anything between two spaces is a word. That is fast and mostly right, but it fails on dashes, slashes and hyphens. The 99digest counter follows the Unicode rules for word boundaries instead, much like the rules your browser uses when you double-click a word to select it. Punctuation never counts as a word, numbers do, and an apostrophe stays inside its word.

Same text, different counts

These are real results from our Word Counter, and they show where programs part ways:

Hyphenated terms are the usual culprit. A 5,000-word report full of “long-term”, “client-side” and “built-in” can differ by dozens of words between two tools, and none of them is wrong. They just apply different rules.

Counting step by step

1. Paste the text into the box. Counts update as you type, so you can also write straight into it. Nothing you paste leaves your browser.
2. Read the word total first, then the character counts. “Characters” includes spaces; “Characters (no spaces)” does not.
3. Check sentences and paragraphs if an assignment sets a structure, such as “five paragraphs”.
4. Look at reading and speaking time if the text will be read aloud or published.

Staying under a limit

Find out how the limit is measured before you start trimming. Some forms count characters, not words, and a few include the title or the bibliography. If the rules are silent, count the body text only, then leave a margin of two or three percent, because the submission system may count differently from you.

Do the counting after the last edit. Cutting a sentence late and forgetting to recount is the classic way to end up over by a handful of words. If your tool counts hyphenated terms as separate words and the form does not, you will be a little under the true limit, which is the safe direction to be wrong.

Reading and speaking time

The counter estimates reading time at 238 words per minute. That is the average Marc Brysbaert found for adults silently reading English non-fiction, in a 2019 review of 190 studies (Journal of Memory and Language); most people fall between roughly 175 and 300. Speaking time uses 150 words per minute, a widely used pace for presentations rather than a measured average. At those rates:

• 650 words takes about 2 minutes 44 seconds to read and 4 minutes 20 seconds to say aloud.
• 1,000 words takes about 4 minutes 12 seconds to read and 6 minutes 40 seconds to say aloud.

Treat these as planning figures. Technical text reads slower than a story, and nervous speakers usually talk faster than they expect.

Languages written without spaces

Chinese and Japanese are written without spaces between words, so a space-based word count is meaningless there, and even a boundary-based count depends on a dictionary. Writers in these languages normally measure length in characters instead. School and publishing limits are commonly set that way, and in Japan manuscript paper has traditionally held 400 characters a page. Korean uses spaces, but length targets are often given in characters too, with or without spaces. If you are checking text in one of these languages, read the “Characters” figure and ignore the word total.

Frequently asked questions