Word Counter

A word count is produced by splitting text on whitespace and counting the resulting tokens, so a hyphenated compound like well-known counts as one word while a contraction like it's also counts as one word because there's no space inside it. This matches how word processors such as Microsoft Word and Google Docs count words, so the figure shown here should line up with what you'd get pasting the same text into either one.

Sentence and paragraph counts follow simpler rules. Sentences are detected by counting terminal punctuation, periods, question marks and exclamation points, which means an abbreviation like Dr. or e.g. can occasionally be miscounted as the end of a sentence. Paragraphs are counted as blocks of text separated by a blank line, so adding or removing a line break changes the paragraph count without changing the word count at all.

This kind of counter matters whenever a word count is a hard requirement: meeting an essay's minimum or maximum word count, staying inside an SEO brief's target range, checking that a cover letter fits on one page, or making sure a script will run to roughly the right length once it's read aloud.