Check the word count of an essay, PDF or Word file against its limit, nothing uploaded
Processed in your browser. Nothing is uploaded. Updated on 25 Oct 2026.Check a draft against its word limit before you submit it: paste the text, or open the PDF or Word file itself and every page is counted in your browser without uploading anything. University essays, scholarship forms and job applications set hard ceilings, and portals often count differently from your editor.
Paste the essay into the box, or drop a PDF or Word file onto it.
Read the Words count at the top, with Sentences and Paragraphs beside it.
Look at Top keywords to spot words you repeat too often; Hide common words removes the, and and of.
Press Copy counts to keep the numbers for your submission.
You also see sentences, paragraphs and how long the text takes to read aloud.
This word counter shows the number of words, characters with and without spaces, sentences, paragraphs and lines while you type. It also works out the reading time at 238 words per minute and the speaking time at 150, and lists the words you use most with their share of the text.
People use it to keep an essay or statement of purpose under a word limit, to trim a speech to the minutes they have been given, and to check that a blog post is not leaning on one phrase too heavily. The limit readouts show at a glance whether an X post fits in 280, a meta description in 155 and an SMS in 160 characters.
It counts other scripts properly. Hindi, Marathi, Tamil and other Indian languages keep their vowel signs attached, so each word counts once and each letter as you see it. Chinese, Japanese and Thai do not use spaces, so the browser's own word segmenter finds the word breaks. The text stays in your browser; nothing is uploaded or stored on a server. One paste can be up to two million characters, roughly 330,000 words, and the box says so before you reach it.
The rest of the article about Word Counter is on the Word Counter page.
Press Open PDF or Word, or drop the PDF onto the box. The page reads the text of every page in your browser and counts it at once: words, characters, sentences, paragraphs and reading time. Nothing is uploaded. A scanned PDF holds pictures of words rather than text, so the page says so instead of showing zero.
Yes. Open a .docx file here and its text is read and counted in the browser, including text in tables. An old .doc file cannot be read by a browser reliably; open it in Word or LibreOffice, save it as .docx, and open that copy instead.
Portals count differently. Most split on spaces, so "well-known" is one word, as it is here and in Word, but some count a hyphenated word as two, or skip numbers and footnotes. If the limit is strict, leave a margin of about two per cent below it rather than writing to the exact number.
It depends on the institution, and the rules page usually says. Many universities exclude the reference list and the title but include in-text citations and footnotes. Check by pasting only the part that counts: the total updates as you edit, so you can see the counted and uncounted parts separately.
About 3 minutes 20 seconds at 150 words a minute, a comfortable speaking pace, and about 2 minutes to read silently at 238 words a minute. The page shows both times for whatever you paste or open, so a timed speech or a video script can be trimmed to fit before you record it.
A Flesch reading ease of 60 to 70 is plain English that most adults read without effort; 30 to 50 is difficult, the level of most academic writing, and below 30 is very difficult. The page shows the score and its Flesch-Kincaid US school grade once English text has three sentences and 30 words. Shorter sentences and shorter words raise the score.
Still stuck? Ask about Word Counter and anybody who knows can answer. No account needed.
On the related tools: URL Extractor – Find every link in pasted text or HTML and get them as a clean, deduplicated list · Unicode to Kruti Dev Converter – Turn Unicode Hindi into Kruti Dev 010 keys for Word, PageMaker and typing practice · Dummy Text Generator – Fill a layout with neutral dummy text of the length you need.
In the collection Text Tools.