Word Counter and Reading Time Calculator for Journalists
Filing over length is the fastest way to have someone else decide which of your paragraphs survives. The counting itself is trivial; the reason to do it in a browser tab rather than a word processor is that copy pasted into an online tool usually goes somewhere.
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Word Counter
Paste or type your text below to see live word count, reading time and structure stats.
Paste your text above to see word count and reading time.
How it works
- Paste or type into the box and every figure updates as you go. Nothing is submitted, stored or sent anywhere — the whole calculation happens in the page.
- Words are counted by splitting on runs of whitespace, so hyphenated compounds count as one and an em-dash with spaces around it counts as a word.
- Characters are given both with and without spaces, which matters when filing to a character-limited field rather than a word count.
- Sentences are counted by matching full stops, question marks and exclamation marks followed by a space or the end of the text; paragraphs by splitting on blank lines.
- Reading time is shown at both 200 and 250 words per minute, rounded to the nearest half minute, with anything under a minute shown as “< 1 min”.
When to use it
- Filing to a commissioned length, when the difference between 800 and 950 words is somebody else’s cut.
- Writing to a hard character limit — a standfirst, a social card, a picture caption, a CMS field.
- Estimating a read time for a piece before it goes into a template that displays one.
- Checking paragraph density in a long read, where the paragraph count against the word count tells you how heavy the blocks have become.
- When you would rather not paste unpublished copy into a third-party service that keeps it.
What it does not do
- This tool makes no editorial or legal judgement of any kind and is not legal advice. It counts characters; it cannot tell you whether anything you have written is accurate, fair or safe to publish.
- Despite the description used elsewhere on the site, there is no field for a commissioned length and no target to compare against. It reports a count; the comparison is yours to make.
- Sentence counting is naive. Abbreviations, initials and decimal points all read as sentence endings, so the figure inflates on copy containing “Mr.”, “U.S.” or “3.5”.
- Word counts differ between tools. A CMS, a word processor and a subs desk may each count hyphenation, numerals and captions differently, so treat this as a close estimate rather than the authoritative number.
- Reading time at 200 or 250 words per minute is a convention, not a measurement, and it takes no account of tables, quotes, pull-outs or embedded media.
More tools
This is one of the free tools on UK JournoHub. See the full tools index for the rest.