Your favorite word counter, now with a dark mode! Count the number of characters, words, sentences, paragraphs, and lines in your text instantly.
Note
This calculator was designed for use with English text. It may work for other languages, but I can't guarantee that the results will be accurate. See the specification for more details on how the calculator works.
Tally Word Counter is a free online tool to count the number of characters, words, paragraphs, and lines in your text. It can also show counts for different types of characters like letters, digits, spaces, and symbols/special characters. Make sure you have the right number of words for your essay or post by counting them instantly with Tally.
Also check out the Tally Chrome Extension here.
- 🧮 View text metrics: Count the number of characters, words, sentences, paragraphs, and lines in your text.
- 📊 View character composition: View the number of spaces, digits, letters, and symbols/special characters in the input.
- 🚀 Real-time updates: Optimized for speed, Tally updates the counts in real-time as you type.
- 🎨 Themes: Save your eyes with the built-in dark mode, or try one of the other included themes.
- 🆓 100% Free & Ad-Free: Use the tool without distractions, privacy-invasive tracking, or paywalls — no ads, no sign-ups, no limitations.
- 👨🏻💻 Open-source: Know how to code? Help make Tally better by contributing to the project on GitHub, or copy it and make your own version!
- 📚 Students & Educators: Check essay lengths and assignment limits quickly and accurately.
- ✍️ Writers & Bloggers: Track writing progress and optimize structure for readability.
- 📄 Legal & Business Professionals: Ensure documents meet required character or word counts.
- 📱 Social Media Managers: Stay within platform limits for tweets, posts, and bios.
- 🧪 Developers & Testers: Analyze input strings and view line counts for code and data.
- 🌐 SEO Specialists: Optimize content length for meta descriptions, headings, and body text.
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| Dark theme - v3 | Light theme - v3 |
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| Teal theme - v3 | Dusk theme - v3 |
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| Available options - v3 | Available themes - v3 |
Note
In this specification, we refer to words, characters, spaces, lines, etc. as tokens for simplicity.
There may be slight variations between the counts generated by Tally and other word counters due to differences in how they are implemented.
The counting function is implemented as a single-pass parser for performance reasons. State transitions (sentence terminator -> letter, letter -> space, etc.) are used to determine when to increment the counts for each token type.
The following characters are used to separate tokens:
- Space:
' ' - Newline:
\n - End Mark:
.,!,?
End of Input can also be considered a separator because words, sentences, paragraphs, and lines at the end of the input are counted even if not specifically terminated. For example, Something is counted as a word, sentence, paragraph, and line.
Here is an overview of how we determine the counts for each token type:
| Count Type | Description |
|---|---|
| character | A Unicode grapheme cluster (user-perceived character), as determined by Intl.Segmenter. This is currently hardcoded to use the en locale, but other locales may work as well. Using this method, Emojis and other multi-codepoint characters are counted as a single character. Examples: a, 2, !, 🔥, 貓 |
| word | A contiguous sequence of one or more letters or digits followed by a space, end mark, or newline. Symbols by themselves are not considered words. Examples: space , Whoa!, newline\n, 42. |
| sentence | A contiguous sequence of one or more words followed by an end mark. Example: Hello, world!, 20 93.. |
| paragraph | A contiguous sequence of one or more sentences followed by a newline. Examples: The quick brown cat jumps over the lazy dog\n, Hello world! Bye world!\n, 42\n. |
| space | A literal space character (' '). Other whitespace (ex. tabs, newlines) are not included. |
| letter | A character in the ASCII ranges A–Z or a–z. Examples: A, j, z. |
| digit | A character in the ASCII range 0-9. Examples: 0, 5, 9. |
| symbol | A non-letter, non-digit, non-space, non-newline character. This includes emojis, symbols, punctuation, and most whitespace. Examples: ,, %, #, 😊, 貓, \t. |
| line | A literal newline character (\n). |
This project is licensed under the MIT License. See LICENSE for details.
