Estimated reading & speaking time
How this word counter works
Everything is counted locally in your browser — nothing is uploaded. The counter treats English words and Chinese characters using different conventions, then adds them together for a single "total words" figure. An English word is any run of letters separated by spaces, so abbreviations like "U.S." and hyphenated words like "well-known" each count as one word. A Chinese character is each individual ideograph, because written Chinese has no spaces between words.
Characters counts every character including spaces and line breaks; characters (no spaces) removes all whitespace. Sentences are counted by the terminal punctuation . ! ? and their Chinese equivalents 。 ！ ？. Paragraphs are groups of non-empty lines separated by blank lines, and lines is simply the total number of lines in your text.
Reading and speaking time
Reading speed is estimated at three paces: slow, normal and fast. For English we use 150 / 200 / 250 words per minute; for Chinese we use 250 / 350 / 450 characters per minute. Speaking aloud is estimated at 130 words per minute for English and 200 characters per minute for Chinese. Mixed text is split automatically, so a bilingual document is timed using the right rate for each language.
These figures are useful for essays, blog posts, scripts and video captions. If you want to prepare a speech, try our reading time calculator. To check how often a specific word appears, use the keyword density tool. To quickly reformat text, see the case converter.