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TextLabFree online word counter
Word counter for essays, articles and posts
TextLab's word counter counts the words, characters, sentences, paragraphs and lines in anything you paste, and updates them on every keystroke. It is free, needs no signup and sets no length limit, so a 100,000-word thesis is measured in the same tab as a 40-word caption. It also gives reading time at 238 words a minute, speaking time at 130, and a density table showing which words you lean on hardest.
- 100% free
- No signup
- No word limit
- Counts as you type
- Reading + speaking time
Keyword density
The ten words you lean on most will appear here, each as a share of your total word count.
All 52 text tools
Everything on TextLab works the same way as the counter above: paste, read the result, move on. Pick the 51 other tools apart by what they do to your text — count it, convert it, generate it, recase it, reorder it, clean it, score it, search it or shorten it into a link.
Counting
12 toolsWord Counter
Counts the words in anything you paste and keeps the total moving as you type, so a 1,500-word essay tells you how much is left to write.
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Character Counter
Gives the character count with and without spaces — the two different numbers a 280-character post and a 4,000-character personal statement are measured against.
Syllable Counter
Splits every word into syllables and totals them, for haiku lines, sonnet meter and the syllables-per-word figure readability formulas run on.
Sentence Counter
Counts sentences and shows the length of each one, which is how you find the 60-word monster buried in the middle of a paragraph.
Letter Counter
Counts letters only — digits, spaces and punctuation left out — and lists how many times each letter of the alphabet turns up.
Line Counter
Totals the lines in a pasted block and separates the blank ones from the rest, which is the count that never matches when you do it by eye.
Words to Minutes
Turns a word count into speaking minutes at whatever pace you present at, so a 10-minute slot tells you how many words to prepare.
Reading Time Calculator
Works out how long an article takes to read at 238 words a minute, and shows what a slower or faster reader would need.
Keyword Density Checker
Reports what share of a page each word and each two- or three-word phrase takes up, so you can see the moment a keyword tips into stuffing.
Paragraph Counter
Counts paragraphs rather than the blank lines between them, and prints the word count of each so the bloated ones stand out.
Word Frequency Counter
Ranks every word by how often it appears, optionally hiding the, of and and, to show what a draft is actually repeating.
Unique Word Counter
Counts how many different words a text uses against how many words it contains — the ratio editors read as vocabulary range.
Notation converters
7 toolsMorse Code Translator
Writes English as dots and dashes and reads it back, with audio at 5–40 words a minute and the full ITU character table.
Binary Translator
Reads a row of 0s and 1s back as words and writes words as digits, in UTF-8, UTF-16, Latin-1 or plain ASCII.
Roman Numeral Converter
Converts any number from 1 to 3,999 into Roman numerals and back, using the subtractive forms IV, IX and XL rather than IIII.
Number to Words
Spells a figure out the way a check or a contract needs it, so 1,204 becomes one thousand two hundred four, in British or American form.
Text to Binary
Shows the 8-bit code behind each character next to the character itself, so you can check a message one letter at a time.
Text to Hex
Rewrites words as hexadecimal, two digits per byte, and turns a hex string back into readable text.
ROT13 Decoder
Shifts every letter thirteen places to hide or reveal a spoiler, puzzle answer or forum punchline — one button does both directions.
Generators
4 toolsRandom Word Generator
Deals out random English words — nouns, verbs, adjectives or adverbs, as many as you ask for — for writing prompts, Pictionary rounds and vocabulary drills.
Username Generator
Builds pronounceable usernames you can actually remember, with optional digits and a length cap to fit whatever a signup form allows.
Random Letter Generator
Draws letters A to Z at random, with or without repeats, for alphabet games, spelling practice and deciding who goes first.
Random Sentence Generator
Assembles complete, grammatical sentences at random to break a blank page, warm up a writing class or fill a layout with real prose.
Letter case
6 toolsCase Converter
Moves a block of text between seven cases — UPPERCASE, lowercase, Title Case, Sentence case, Capitalize Each Word, aLtErNaTiNg and iNVERSE — without retyping a syllable.
Uppercase to Lowercase
Rescues a paragraph typed with caps lock on, dropping every capital to lowercase but keeping the acronyms you name — NASA and PhD survive the pass.
Title Case Converter
Capitalizes a headline by AP, Chicago, MLA or APA rules side by side, since the four disagree about short words like with, over and than.
Sentence Case Converter
Puts a capital at the start of each sentence and lowercases the rest, leaving I, names and acronyms you list alone.
Text to Uppercase
Raises text to capitals for a heading, a poster or a form that insists on them, accented letters included.
Capitalize Each Word
Capitalizes every single word, and and the included — the blunt cousin of title case, and what column headers and name fields usually want.
Lists & order
6 toolsRandomize List
Shuffles a pasted list into a genuinely random order for drawing a raffle winner, fixing a running order or splitting a class into teams.
Reverse Text
Writes your text backwards character by character, or flips the order of the words instead.
Reverse String
Turns a single line back to front while keeping accented letters and emoji whole instead of tearing them in half.
Numbered List Generator
Puts 1., 2., 3. in front of every line, with your choice of separator and a starting number that does not have to be one.
Reverse List
Flips a list end over end so the last entry becomes the first, without touching the text inside any line.
Sort Lines Alphabetically
Sorts lines A to Z or Z to A, with an option to ignore capitals so apple and Apple end up beside each other.
Clean up
7 toolsRemove Line Breaks
Rejoins text that a PDF or an email client chopped into short lines, restoring flowing paragraphs while keeping the breaks between them.
Text Cleaner
Sweeps out everything copying drags along — curly quotes, non-breaking spaces, double spaces and invisible formatting marks — in one pass.
Whitespace Remover
Squeezes runs of spaces and tabs down to one and trims the trailing spaces hiding at the end of every line.
Remove Empty Lines
Deletes blank lines from a list or a draft, including the ones that only look blank because they hold a stray space.
Remove Duplicate Lines
Drops repeated lines and tells you how many went, or turns the list inside out to show you only the ones that repeat.
Remove Punctuation
Strips periods, commas, quotes, dashes and brackets and leaves bare words behind, the state word games and text analysis want them in.
Remove Special Characters
Clears out symbols, emoji and control characters that break a filename, a spreadsheet column or a print job, keeping letters, digits and spaces.
Readability
4 toolsText Summarizer
Picks out the sentences carrying most of an article's meaning and hands them back at the length you ask for.
Flesch Reading Ease Calculator
Scores writing from 0 to 100 on Rudolf Flesch's scale and names the reading level it lands on, from very difficult to very easy.
Readability Score
Runs a text through Flesch-Kincaid, Gunning Fog, SMOG, Coleman-Liau and ARI at once and shows where the five tests agree.
Average Word Length
Measures mean letters per word and mean words per sentence, the two figures Coleman-Liau and the Automated Readability Index are built from.
Find & extract
4 toolsEmail Extractor
Lifts every email address out of a pasted page, thread or list, removes the duplicates and returns them one per line or comma-separated.
Text to Columns
Splits each line at a comma, a tab or a character you name and lays the pieces out as a table ready to paste into a spreadsheet.
Find and Replace Text
Swaps up to eight words or phrases at once for another everywhere at once, counts the changes it made, and can respect capitals or ignore them.
Extract Emails from Text
Recognizes addresses written the long way round — name (at) domain dot com — as well as ordinary ones, and gives them all back in normal form.
Slugs
2 toolsSlug Generator
Turns a headline into the lowercase hyphenated tail of a web address, flattening accents and punctuation so Café Menu 2026 becomes cafe-menu-2026.
Permalink Generator
Assembles the whole permanent link for a post from your domain and its title, in the WordPress, Ghost or dated /2026/08/ pattern you publish under.
How to count words
Three steps, no signup, and nothing to install.
Paste your writing into the box
Drop an essay, a chapter, a blog draft or a caption straight into the text area, or press Ctrl+V (⌘V on a Mac) anywhere on this page and it lands there for you. Typing works the same way — the total moves with every keystroke, and there is no Count button to press.
Read the nine counts under the box
Words is the headline figure; underneath it sit characters with spaces, characters without spaces, sentences, paragraphs, lines, unique words, reading time and speaking time. Every number comes from the same pass over your text, so they can never disagree with one another.
Set a word goal or copy the figures out
Type your brief into the Word goal field — 1,500 for a typical undergraduate essay, 250 for an abstract — and the bar fills as you write, counting down the words you still owe. Copy the counts puts all nine figures on your clipboard as plain text, ready to paste into an email to a supervisor or a client.
Technical specifications
| What it counts | Words, characters with spaces, characters without spaces, sentences, paragraphs, lines, unique words, reading time and speaking time |
|---|---|
| What counts as a word | A run of letters or digits; internal hyphens and apostrophes do not split it, so state-of-the-art, don't and 1,500 are one word each |
| How sentences are found | A period, question mark, exclamation mark or ellipsis followed by a break, with 47 abbreviations and single-letter initials (Dr., e.g., J. R. R.) exempted |
| How paragraphs are found | Blocks separated by a blank line; in text with no blank lines at all, every non-empty line counts as one paragraph |
| Length limit | None. A 100,000-word thesis (about 650 KB) is recounted in roughly 15 ms, 250,000 words in about 30 ms |
| Reading and speaking speeds | 238 words per minute silently, 130 words per minute aloud |
| Keyword density | Top 10 words with their share of the total; 127 common function words hidden by default |
| Where the counting happens | In your browser — the text is never uploaded to a server |
| Price | Free, no signup, no cap on how many documents you count |
Frequently asked questions
How do I count the words in my essay?
Paste the essay into the box at the top of this page and the word count appears immediately — there is no upload, no button and no waiting. The figure updates on every keystroke, so you can leave the tab open beside your document and watch it climb while you write. Nothing needs to be installed and no account is involved.
What counts as one word here?
A word is a run of letters or digits, and internal hyphens and apostrophes do not break it apart: state-of-the-art is one word, don't is one word, and 1,500 is one word. A dash standing alone between spaces is punctuation, not a word, so an em dash adds nothing to the total. Figures written as numerals count exactly like words spelled out, which is why swapping twenty-five for 25 leaves your total unchanged.
Does this match the word count in Microsoft Word?
For ordinary prose the two agree, because both split on whitespace and both treat hyphenated compounds and grouped numbers as single words. Where they diverge it is usually about what got selected rather than how it was counted: Word rolls footnotes, endnotes and text boxes into its total only when you tick that option in the Word Count dialog, while this page only ever sees the text you actually copied. Copying the body of a document out of Word therefore gives you the body count, without headers, footers or page numbers muddying it.
Is there a limit on how much text I can paste?
No — there is no word cap, no character cap and no daily quota. A 100,000-word thesis, roughly 650 KB of text, is measured in about 15 milliseconds, and a quarter of a million words still comes back in around 30. The counting is a single linear pass, so doubling the length of a document only doubles the work.
How long does it take to read or speak 1,000 words?
About 4 minutes 12 seconds to read silently and about 7 minutes 42 seconds to say out loud. The reading figure uses 238 words per minute, the average adult rate for English non-fiction established by Marc Brysbaert's 2019 meta-analysis of 190 studies; the speaking figure uses 130, the pace most presentation coaches plan a slot around. Read your own script aloud once with a stopwatch if the timing really matters — an accent, a pause for a slide and a room full of people all pull the real number around.
Do the title, references and footnotes count towards my word limit?
Almost every university counts the main body only and leaves out the title page, the reference list, the appendices and often the footnotes — but the rule belongs to your department, not to any standard, so the handbook beats any tool. Most institutions allow ten per cent either side of the stated limit before a penalty applies. The safe habit is to paste only the section that counts rather than the whole document, and to check the total again after your last round of edits.
Which words show up in the density table?
The ten words you use most often, each with its count and its share of your total word count. The 127 commonest function words — the, of, and, to and their relatives — are hidden by default, because in normal English prose they take the top ten places and tell you nothing; clear the checkbox to see them. Single and two-letter words are left out for the same reason, unless they contain a digit.
Is my writing sent anywhere?
No. Counting happens in the browser tab you are reading this in, so an unpublished manuscript or a client's draft never leaves your machine. One side effect worth knowing: once this page has loaded, the counter keeps working with the network switched off.
Why two tools rarely agree on a word count
Word counting looks like the one text operation that could not possibly be ambiguous, and then two programs hand you different totals for the same page. The disagreement is almost never arithmetic — it is definition. Everyone splits on whitespace, but they part company over the edge cases: whether mother-in-law is one word or three, whether 1,500 is a word at all, whether a bulleted fragment with no verb counts as a sentence, whether the em dash in then — finally — she left earns its own slot. This counter treats hyphenated compounds, contractions and grouped numbers as single words, which is the convention Microsoft Word and Google Docs both follow, so pasted prose lands on the same figure your word processor showed you.
That matters most when a number carries a penalty. Universities set limits — 1,500 for a first-year essay, 10,000 for a dissertation chapter, 80,000 for a doctoral thesis — and almost all of them allow ten per cent either side before marks come off. What sits inside the limit varies far more than the limit itself: the title page and bibliography are nearly always excluded, appendices usually, footnotes and block quotations sometimes, and only the handbook can settle it. Paste the countable section on its own rather than the whole file, and if the brief is set in characters instead — as application forms and job portals often do — the character counter gives you the two figures those forms actually use, with and without spaces.
A total on its own is a thin measure of a draft, which is why the panel under the box keeps going. Reading and speaking times turn length into something you can plan around — a 10-minute conference talk is roughly 1,300 spoken words, and the reading time calculator lets you push the pace up or down for a specific audience. The density table catches the tic every writer has: the adjective that shows up in four consecutive paragraphs, the transition you cannot stop using. If a term is over about three per cent of a page you are repeating it, and the keyword density checker breaks that down further into two- and three-word phrases. For whether the prose is actually readable rather than merely long, the readability score runs five established formulas over the same text.
Where your writing goes
Nowhere. The text you paste stays inside the browser tab you have open: it is counted by JavaScript already downloaded to your own machine, and it is never uploaded, logged or stored. Close the tab or press Clear and it is gone, with nothing kept for your next visit — which is also why an unpublished manuscript is safe to paste here and why the counter still works on a plane.