Count words and characters, including Arabic

The word counter measures a passage as you type or paste it: words, characters, characters without spaces, sentences, paragraphs, and a reading time. It is built for mixed Arabic and English, which is where many counters quietly go wrong. They split on spaces only and then treat an Arabic letter as two units, or they ignore the Arabic question mark and call a whole paragraph one sentence.

Words come from the browser’s Intl.Segmenter. When the text contains Arabic letters, the segmenter runs in Arabic, so spaces, Arabic punctuation, and ؟ break the text the way a reader does. Characters are Unicode characters. An Arabic letter is one character, a Latin letter is one character, and an emoji is one character. “Without spaces” removes whitespace, including line breaks, and keeps everything else. A haraka (a short-vowel mark) is its own character, so it is included in the character totals and does not by itself create a new word.

Paragraphs are blocks separated by blank lines. A single line break inside a paragraph does not start a new one; a blank line does. Sentences use the sentence segmenter, so “مرحبا بالعالم. كيف حالك؟” is two sentences, not one.

Reading time uses 200 words a minute for words that are not Arabic and 180 for Arabic words. Mixed text takes a weighted average. Under a minute, the label says “Less than a minute”. After that it rounds up. It is a planning figure for silent reading, not a measurement of how fast a particular person reads aloud.

1. Open Word Counter.
2. Paste or type. The box uses automatic direction, so an Arabic paragraph aligns to the right and an English one to the left. You can mix them.
3. Read the six figures. If a teacher asked for characters without spaces, use that tile rather than the full character count.
4. The text is not saved. Copy what you need back into your document. Closing the tab clears the box.

There is a cap at 100,000 characters. Past that, only the first 100,000 are counted, and the page says so. A full book should be counted in chapters. The cap is there so a huge paste does not freeze the tab, not because the rest of the text was sent anywhere.

The counter does not grade grammar, does not detect copied work, and does not know your teacher’s private rules. Some assignments count a hyphenated word as one word and some do not. The segmenter makes one consistent choice and shows it immediately, which is more useful than a number that changes after an upload. Numbers, dates, and URLs count as words when the segmenter says they are words. A string of punctuation with no letters may add a sentence boundary without adding a word.

If you needed the amount written out in Arabic words rather than counted, that is Arabic Numbers, which spells currency with the dual, the plural, and the accusative forms a cheque expects. This page only counts.

The passage stays in the tab. Counting does not call a server. Do not paste a password or a full identity document into any web page out of habit, including this one: the text is not uploaded, and you also do not need a word count of a password. The Privacy Policy describes analytics on the public site. The counting rules are spelled out in how to count Arabic and English words.