Word count for writing that has a limit
Most writing has a ceiling somewhere — an essay word count, a meta description that gets truncated in search results, a character limit on a form field. This counter updates as you type so you can see where you stand without switching tools.
The counts here are deliberately explicit about their rules, because different tools disagree. A hyphenated compound like well-known counts as one word. Numbers count as words. Sentence detection requires actual content, so trailing punctuation does not inflate the count.
Related counting tools
For byte-level detail and encoding sizes, use the character counter. To see which words you are leaning on too heavily, the word frequency tool ranks them by density.