counterwords.net is a free word counter and text analyzer. Paste or type your text and you immediately see word, character, sentence and paragraph counts, reading and speaking time, repeated words and phrases, and a breakdown of your writing patterns.
No sign-up. No upload. No limits on how much text you paste. Sign up is optional if you want.
Why we built it
The word counters already on the web fell into two camps. Some were fast but shallow – a word count, a character count, and nothing else.
Others were crammed with features but slow to load, heavy with advertising, and vague about what happened to the text you pasted into them.
Neither camp answered the question people actually arrive with, which is almost never “how many words is this?” on its own. It is usually “how many words is this, and will the person marking it agree with that number?“
We built Counter Words to answer both.
How it works
The entire tool runs inside your browser. When you type, the analysis is performed by Java Script on your own device.
Your text is not uploaded to our server. It is not written to our database. It is not sent to any third party or AI service.
This is not a policy we could quietly reverse – there is no upload step anywhere in the code.
Three things follow from that:
- It is instant. A fifty thousand word manuscript is analyzed as fast as a tweet, because nothing is waiting on a network.
- It works offline. Load the page once and it keeps counting with no connection.
- It is genuinely private. We could not hand over your text if we were asked for it, because we never received it.
Why word counts disagree
This is the part most tools stay quiet about, and it is the reason we exist.
Word counting looks settled until you look closely. Is “mother-in-law” one word or three? Does “don’t” count once or twice?
What about a URL, an email address, a footnote marker, a heading, a page number, or the reference list at the end of an essay?
Every counter answers these differently, and almost none of them tell you which answers they chose.
A student who gets three different totals for the same essay has no way to work out which one their tutor will use.
So we did the opposite of hiding it. All sixteen counting rules are listed in the Count Rules panel, each one switchable, with your totals updating the instant you change one.
Our defaults follow the conventions Microsoft Word uses, because that is what most people are measured against:
- Hyphenated terms count as one word – “well-known” is 1, not 2
- Contractions count as one word – “don’t” is 1, not 2
- Decimals and grouped numbers count as one – “3.14” and “1,000,000” are 1 each
- Initialisms count as one – “U.S.A.” and “Ph.D.” are 1 each
- URLs and email addresses count as one word
- A missing space still means two words – “Hello,world” is 2, not 1
You are never stuck with those. Excluding a bibliography from an essay limit, counting hyphenated terms as separate words, ignoring URLs in a draft – all one click.
Beyond counting
Counting is where the tool starts, not where it ends.
Repetition. Which words and phrases you repeat, how often, and in which paragraphs. Click any word to highlight every occurrence in your text.
Sentence and paragraph length. A distribution rather than an average, because an average hides the problem. Twenty sentences of identical length average the same as ten short and ten long, and only one of those reads well.
Sentence openings. How often you begin consecutive sentences the same way – a habit that is invisible while writing and obvious when read back.
Transitions and filler phrases. Which connectives you lean on, and which padding has crept in.
Possible passive voice. Flagged as an estimate, not a verdict.
None of this involves AI, and none of it is a grade. They are patterns, shown plainly, for you to judge.
A repeated word may be exactly the right choice. A long sentence may be doing real work. The tool points; it does not correct.
Who it is for
- Students working to an essay word limit, especially where references are excluded
- Writers checking pacing, repetition and rhythm across a draft
- Editors reviewing sentence length and structure before a line edit
- Translators and copywriters counting billable words
- Marketers and SEOs trimming a meta description to 160 characters or a post to 280
- Anyone who would rather not paste a confidential draft into a server they know nothing about
The browser extension
The same engine is available as a free browser extension, so you can count selected text on any page without leaving it.
It shares its code and its counting rules with this website, which is why the two never disagree about a total. It also handles the places other extensions give up on: text boxes and comment fields, sign-in forms inside iframes, and – via copy and paste – Google Docs and PDF viewers, which draw their text onto a canvas where no extension can read it directly.
Accuracy, and how to tell us we got it wrong
Every counting rule is tested against the conventions Microsoft Word and Google Docs use, including the awkward cases: abbreviations mid-sentence, decimals, currency, accented characters, and text in scripts other than Latin.
We will not pretend it is infallible. If a count looks wrong to you, we would genuinely like to know.
Email contact@counterwords.net with the exact text and the number you expected, and we will look at it properly.
Corrections to the engine are shipped to the website and the extension together, so they never drift apart.
One honest limit: languages written without spaces between words, such as Chinese and Japanese, will not count accurately. We would rather say so than return a confident wrong answer.
How the site stays free
CounterWords is funded by advertising. There is no premium tier, no trial, and no feature held back behind an account.
Advertising is never given access to the editor. Ad scripts cannot read what you type, and the arrangement of the page keeps them away from your text entirely.
Your writing is not part of the business model – the whole point of building the tool this way is that we do not have it to sell.
Who runs it
Counter Words is built and maintained by Niche Bloggers LLC, a small content company based in United States.
We publish and manage a portfolio of niche websites, so word counts are not an abstract problem for us – they are in every brief we write, every invoice we approve, and every draft we send back.
We got tired of writers and editors landing on different totals for the same piece because each of them used a different free tool, and none of those tools would say what rules they were applying.
So we built one that does. CounterWords is the counter we use ourselves, every day, on our own work.
Get in touch
Questions, bug reports, corrections and feature requests are all welcome at contact@counterwords.net, or through our contact page.
We read everything. The counting rules panel exists because enough people asked why the number was different from Word.