Word Counter

About Word Counter

Confileo's Word Counter tool counts words, sentences and reading time as you type, with nothing uploaded. Everything runs in your browser, free and without signup, and nothing is uploaded.

Word counts are targets. An essay with a 1,500-word requirement, a blog post commissioned at 800, a personal statement capped at 500, a conference abstract limited to 250, a client brief priced per thousand — in each case the number is a constraint someone else set, and knowing where you stand against it while writing is more useful than finding out afterwards. This page counts as you type, with no upload and no account.

Counting words sounds unambiguous and is not. This page splits on whitespace, which means a hyphenated compound like state-of-the-art counts as one word and a contraction like don't counts as one — the same convention Word and Google Docs use, so the number here matches the one your tutor or editor will see. Splitting on punctuation instead, which some counters do, would score those as four and two, and would also drop any language that does not put spaces where English does.

Reading and speaking time come from the word count, and the figures behind them are worth stating rather than hiding. Reading time uses 238 words per minute, the average for silent reading of English prose from Brysbaert's 2019 meta-analysis of 190 studies — a more defensible number than the round 200 that most tools copy from each other. Speaking time uses 140 words per minute, the middle of the usual range for a prepared talk. Text in another language is timed at its own rate, scaled by the IReST study of one passage read in 17 languages — Arabic at 144 words a minute, German at 187, Chinese and Japanese per character. If you are timing a presentation, the speaking figure is the one to trust; five minutes is roughly 700 words of English.

You also get characters, characters without spaces, sentences, paragraphs and lines. Sentence and paragraph counts are the quickest structural check on a draft: a paragraph count of one on a 900-word piece tells you something before anyone reads it, and dividing words by sentences gives you an average sentence length, which is the single most reliable readability signal there is. Under 20 reads easily; over 30 usually needs breaking up.

The same live limit table as the character counter is included, because word targets and platform limits often apply to the same piece of text — a LinkedIn post has both a word count you are aiming for and a 3,000-character ceiling you cannot cross.

Everything is computed in your browser. The draft you paste is never uploaded, never stored and never seen by anyone else, which matters when the text is unpublished work.

Quick facts

Price

3 credits per use — runs in your browser (free every month: 50 credits as a guest, 300 with a free account)

Signup

Not required

Max file size

Up to 100 MB per file

Your files

Deleted automatically after processing

Works on

Any browser — desktop, tablet, mobile

Watermark

None on your output

How to use Word Counter

1. 1Paste or type your text.
2. 2Watch the word count update against your target as you write.
3. 3Check reading and speaking time, and the sentence and paragraph counts, for a quick structural read on the draft.

Why use Confileo

• ✓Try it free — 50 credits a month with no account and 300 a month with a free one; no watermarks and no credit card.
• ✓No signup or account required — start using it instantly.
• ✓Your files are processed securely and deleted automatically for full privacy.
• ✓Works in any browser on desktop, tablet and mobile — nothing to install.
• ✓Fast processing built to handle real, everyday document workloads.

Word Counter — Frequently asked questions

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