jamuny.editor

Word and Character Counter

Words
0
Characters
0
Characters (no spaces)
0
Sentences
0
Paragraphs
0
Lines
0
Reading time

Paste or type and the counts update as you go: no button to press. Alongside words and characters you get characters excluding spaces, which is what most social and SMS limits actually measure, plus sentences, paragraphs and an estimated reading time at 200 words per minute. Emoji and accented letters count as one character each rather than two, which is where a naive length check goes wrong.

What "local-first" means

Most online text tools send whatever you paste to a server, run the work there, and send a result back. Your words sit in someone else's logs, backups and databases, and you have to trust a privacy policy.

Local-first means the opposite: the whole tool is downloaded to your browser and runs on your own device. Nothing you type is transmitted anywhere: not to us, not to anyone. There is no server that could receive it, which is a stronger guarantee than a promise not to look.

Three consequences worth knowing:

You do not have to take that on trust. Open your browser's developer tools, watch the network panel, and type: nothing appears in it.The network's verify page walks through the same check on every Jamuny tool.

How to use it

  1. Paste or type. Counts update as you go. There is no button.
  2. Read the count you need. Words, characters with spaces, characters without spaces, sentences, paragraphs and reading time are all shown together.

Worked example

The two character counts differ

Input
Hello there, world.
Output
Words: 3
Characters (with spaces): 19
Characters (no spaces): 17
Sentences: 1

Which character count a limit means

Social posts, SMS messages and most form validation count every character including spaces and punctuation. Some database columns and legacy systems count only non-whitespace. Both numbers are shown because guessing wrong by two characters is enough to have a submission rejected.

If you are writing to a hard limit, check which one the destination uses before trusting either figure.

Why an emoji counts as one character here

Many counters report an emoji as two, because internally most emoji occupy two UTF-16 code units and a naive length check counts those units rather than characters. That is a detail of how JavaScript stores text, not something a reader would recognise.

This counts what a person would call a character, so an emoji is one and an accented letter is one. Where that distinction bites is a platform that counts the naive way, as some SMS gateways do, in which case an emoji-heavy message may be rejected at a length this tool reports as fine.

How reading time is estimated

Words divided by two hundred per minute, rounded up. Two hundred words per minute is a common estimate for adult silent reading of ordinary prose.

Treat it as a rough guide rather than a measurement. Dense technical writing with code in it reads considerably slower; dialogue and simple narrative read faster. It is useful for choosing between a five-minute and a fifteen-minute piece, not for anything finer.

Reading aloud is a different figure again: roughly a hundred and thirty words per minute, so if you are timing a talk or a voiceover, expect it to run about half as long again as the estimate shown here.

What counts as a word, a sentence and a paragraph

A word is a run of characters separated by whitespace, so hyphenated compounds count as one and an em dash with spaces around it does not inflate the total. Numbers and standalone symbols count as words, which is why a table of figures reports a higher count than the prose in it would suggest.

A sentence ends at a full stop, question mark or exclamation mark. That means abbreviations containing full stops (e.g., i.e., Dr.) inflate the sentence count slightly. No counter solves this reliably without understanding the text, so the number is best read as an indicator of average sentence length rather than an exact tally.

A paragraph is a block separated by a blank line. Text pasted from a PDF often arrives with a line break after every visual line rather than at real paragraph ends, which makes the paragraph count meaningless until those breaks are cleaned up.

Questions

Why do two character counts differ from each other?

One includes spaces, tabs and newlines; the other excludes all whitespace. Post and message limits usually count everything including spaces, while some form fields and database columns do not.

Does an emoji count as one character or two?

One. Many counters report two because an emoji occupies two UTF-16 code units internally, which is a detail of how text is stored rather than anything a reader would recognise as two characters.

How is reading time calculated?

Words divided by 200 per minute, rounded up, which is a common estimate for adult silent reading of prose. Treat it as a rough guide: dense technical writing reads slower and dialogue reads faster.

Is my text sent anywhere to be counted?

No. Counting happens in your browser as you type and there is no server to send it to, so a draft or a confidential document stays on your machine.