Calculators

Statistics

Calculator Use

Count the number of words in a sample of text. The word counter also counts characters, spaces, line breaks and other whitespace characters like tabs.

Insert your text sample by pasting, typing or using the speech-to-text function on your device.

How Do Word Counters Count?

Word counters do not all count words the same way. Some count whitespace and words like "the" or "an" while others do not. Some only count the spaces then give you number of spaces plus one for the word count.

This word counter counts all actual words including small words like "a," "an," and "the." But we do give you the option to filter out certain words called stop words. This is helpful if you are interested in word density for SEO or other content purposes.

About Stop Words

Stop words are words that are omitted from word counting programs. They are considered non-important to the substance of a text passage in terms of content. They are not counted so you can evaluate how well a text passage is constructed using words that are important to your content.

If you check the box to "Omit Stop Words for Density Chart" this word counter will not count the stop words. We use the list of stop words compiled by Semrush, a company that specializes in search engine optimization. You can see the list at the Semrush Blog.

Word Counter Output

These bullet points explain how this word counter calculates totals. Word count and character totals, along with word density are shown in the answer.

• All Words - words are groups of one or more letters or numbers. "Twenty" and "20" are counted as words. Special characters by themselves such as & or $ or ( are not counted as words. Compound words like "up-to-date" or "sister-in-law" are counted as one word as long as the hyphen is an actual hyphen character. If you use something like an em dash as in twenty—five, it will be split into two words. Likewise contractions that use an apostrophe such as they'll are counted as one word as long as the character used is an actual apostrophe.
• Unique Words - the number of unique words that occur in the text sample
• Spaces - includes all space characters such as a normal spacebar space, non-breaking space, thin space, en space, em space, etc. Spaces are counted as one character.
• Tabs - tabs are counted as one character
• Line Breaks - on computers and other devices line breaks are actually made up of two non-visible characters: the carriage return (CR) and the line feed (LF). These two entities are counted as one character known as the CRLF.
• All Characters - includes all visible characters and whitespace characters including spaces, tabs and line breaks
• Visible Characters - characters that you can see in the text are counted. Whitespace characters are not counted.
• Word Density Table - lists the total number of times each word is found in the text. We calculate density by the frequency of each word as a percentage of all words counted. The density chart does not include numbers as words. You have the option to include all words or remove stop words from the calculation.
• Stop Words - it might be important to omit stop words from your totals if you are evaluating text for search engine marketing or search engine optimization. Stop words are skipped by this word counter if you check the box to do so. By removing stop words from your frequency calculation you can better assess your keyword density.