How is a word defined?

A word is a run of letters or digits, where an internal apostrophe or hyphen keeps the parts together. So don't counts as one word, and well-known counts as one word, matching how English speakers read them.

What counts as a sentence?

Sentences are split on a period, exclamation mark, or question mark followed by a space or the end of the text. Multiple terminal marks in a row, like an interrobang, count as a single sentence break.

How are unique words counted?

Words are lowercased and compared, so The and the are treated as the same word. Curly and straight apostrophes are normalised too, so the count reflects distinct vocabulary rather than capitalisation.

What is the difference between the two character counts?

One count includes every character you typed, including spaces and line breaks. The other excludes all whitespace, which is useful for limits that only count visible characters.

Is my text uploaded anywhere?

No. All counting happens locally in your browser. Nothing is sent to a server, so you can safely paste private or unpublished writing.

English Word Counter

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A word counter is the everyday tool of writers, students, and editors who work to length limits. This counter is tuned for English: it understands contractions and hyphenated compounds, and it reports unique words so you can gauge vocabulary richness and repetition, not just raw length.

How it works

Words are extracted with a pattern that treats internal apostrophes and hyphens as part of a single token, then the other statistics are derived:

words      = tokens matching letters/digits with internal ' or -
uniqueWords = distinct lowercased tokens (count of the set)
sentences  = splits on . ! ? followed by space or end
paragraphs = splits on one or more blank lines
characters = total length; also a no-whitespace variant

Treating don’t and well-known as single words means the totals match how a human would count them, which simpler whitespace splitting gets wrong.

Tips and example

For the text “It’s a well-known fact. Isn’t it?” the counter reports 6 words — because “It’s”, “well-known”, and “Isn’t” are each one word — across 2 sentences. The unique-word count is handy for spotting overused terms: if a 500-word piece has only 180 unique words, you are repeating yourself, which is sometimes intentional for emphasis and sometimes a sign to vary the language. Use the no-whitespace character count when a platform limit, like a meta description, counts visible characters only.