Word counter for Windows

How a word is counted

Text Studio counts a word as an unbroken run of letters and digits. An apostrophe or a hyphen inside the run keeps it together, so don't, rock'n'roll and mother-in-law count once each. Numbers are words too: 2026 is one.

• Punctuation on its own adds nothing: an ampersand or an ellipsis is not a word.
• A full stop, a slash or an @ inside a run splits it, so 3.5 and 24/7 count as two words each, and an email address as three or more.
• A hyphen typed alone between two spaces, as a stand-in for a dash, counts as a word.
• Letters from every alphabet count, accents and all. Languages written without spaces, such as Chinese and Japanese, are counted by the stretches between punctuation marks, so for them the character count is the more useful number.

Every word processor and website draws these lines a little differently, so one text can come out a few words apart in two tools. When a teacher, an editor or an application form sets the limit, the count that decides is the one in the tool they use.

Reading time, and where 238 comes from

The reading time is the word count divided by 238, rounded to whole minutes, or shown in seconds for anything under a minute. The figure comes from a 2019 review of reading studies by the psychologist Marc Brysbaert, which put the average adult's silent reading speed at about 238 words a minute for non-fiction and about 260 for fiction.

Treat it as an average reader on an average text. Dense technical writing, a second language or a small phone screen slow people down. A talk or a video script is spoken more slowly than it is read, so time a rehearsal instead of trusting the figure: Text Studio has no speaking-time count.

Staying under a word limit

Limits are everywhere: 650 words for the Common App personal essay, a few hundred for most abstracts and scholarship answers, a fixed length for a column or a speech. A few habits make them easier to meet:

• Count each part on its own. Paste the whole application in and select one answer at a time; Selected: gives that answer's words while the total stays in view.
• Hunt the filler. Press Ctrl F, turn on Whole words and type “very” or “really”: every one lights up, and the find bar says how many there are.
• Know the page maths. As a rough guide, a double-spaced page in 12-point type holds about 250 to 300 words, and a single-spaced page about twice that.
• Keep the long version. Save a copy before a big cut, and Compare will show which lines you changed.

A counter that is also an editor

Most word counters live on websites, and plenty of them count right in your browser. Text Studio is a different kind of tool: a desktop editor where counting is always on. The page keeps your draft as you type, up to two million characters, so closing the window loses nothing. It opens and saves .txt, .md, .srt and other text files, and it works with no connection at all, on a train or a plane.

Because it is an editor, the next job happens in the same place: tidy double spaces, fix the case of a heading, or replace a name throughout. For Word documents, Octoolo's Documents app has a word and character count of its own.

One thing to know about subtitle files: the caption numbers and timestamps of an .srt count as words too, so its total runs well above the number of words actually spoken.