Word & character counter — offline

The text being counted is usually a draft, and drafts are private by nature: a cover letter, a personal statement, an unpublished blog post, an essay under a strict word limit, a conference talk. Pasting one into an online counter uploads unpublished writing to someone else's server in exchange for arithmetic your browser does instantly.

Counting here is simple string maths running in your browser, updating live as you type or paste. Nothing is transmitted — the site has no backend, and a Content-Security-Policy blocks third-party requests — so it also works with no connection at all.

Alongside words, characters, and sentences, you get two time estimates: roughly 220 words per minute for silent reading and about 140 for speaking aloud. Those are the common averages publishing platforms use for their "5 min read" labels.

The speaking figure is the more useful of the two, because it is the one people habitually get wrong. A twenty-minute conference slot is around 2,800 spoken words, and a script written to be read silently almost always overruns when delivered. Treat both as guides — dense technical prose reads slower than narrative, and speakers vary enormously — but as a sanity check before a deadline or a talk they are reliable.

Characters are counted as real Unicode code points, so an emoji counts as one character rather than two. That is not pedantry: JavaScript stores strings as UTF-16, and a naive string.length reports 2 for most emoji and more for flags and skin-tone variants, which is precisely why some platforms mysteriously reject a message that appears to be under the limit.

Character limits are everywhere and rarely consistent — SMS segments, meta descriptions around 155 characters, social posts, form fields, database columns. Counting the way the receiving system counts is what stops text being silently truncated at the worst moment.

Related and equally local: case converter, text sorter and deduplicator, and Markdown preview for drafting posts.