Text File Generator
Paste anything into the box and this word and character counter breaks it down while you type. You get words, characters with and without spaces, sentences, paragraphs, lines, unique words, average word length, and rough reading and speaking times, all recalculated on every keystroke by your browser rather than a server.
What actually counts as a word
A word here is any run of characters with a space or a line break on either side. So "state-of-the-art" counts once, "don't" counts once, and a stray "&" on its own counts as a word too. Microsoft Word uses the same rule, which is why the two usually agree to within a word or so on ordinary prose.
Where tools start to disagree is on numbers, hyphenated compounds, and text with unusual spacing. If you are writing to a limit that somebody else will check, it is worth pasting a sample into whatever they will be checking with, so you know which direction the difference runs before you are up against the ceiling.
Character limits worth knowing
Character counts matter more than word counts in a lot of places. A meta description gets cut off somewhere around 155 to 160 characters, a page title around 60, an SMS message splits at 160, and plenty of forms and databases stop accepting input at 255. The counter shows characters both with and without spaces because those two numbers can be several dozen apart on a full paragraph, and different systems count them differently.
Watch the unique word figure if you are checking whether something reads as repetitive. A three hundred word paragraph with only ninety unique words is leaning hard on the same handful of terms, and that shows up in the writing long before anyone can explain why it feels flat.
How the reading time is worked out
Reading time divides the word count by 200 words a minute, and speaking time uses 130. Those are averages for adults reading silently and speaking aloud at a comfortable pace, so treat them as a sanity check rather than a stopwatch. Dense technical writing runs slower than that and light copy runs faster.
For a talk or a video script the speaking figure is the more useful of the two, and it is usually generous. Most people slow down in front of an audience, so a script that times at ten minutes here tends to run a touch longer in the room.