Very closely. Both Word and this tool count words as space-separated tokens. The key convention: hyphenated compounds like "self-referential" count as one word, not two. For academic submissions, the difference between this tool and Word is typically less than 0.5% even in long documents.

Google Docs sometimes excludes footnotes, headers, or footnote markers from character counts depending on view settings. This tool counts every character visible in the textarea — punctuation, spaces, and special characters included. Pasting plain text from Docs will typically give matching results.

Numbers count as words ("2026" is one word). Punctuation attached to a word ("hello,") is not counted as a separate token. Standalone symbols like "&" or "/" surrounded by spaces do count as words, matching Word's behavior.

The estimate uses 238 words per minute — the average adult reading speed from academic research. Reading speed varies significantly by content type: technical writing is read at 150–180 wpm, light fiction at 300+ wpm. Treat the estimate as a reasonable approximation, not an exact figure.

No. All counting is done entirely within your browser using JavaScript. Your text is never transmitted to our servers, never stored in a database, and never accessible to anyone other than you. Confidential coursework, professional drafts, and personal writing can all be safely used here.

Yes for character, sentence, and paragraph counts — those are language-agnostic. Word counting works for any space-delimited language. For Chinese, Japanese, and Korean — which do not use spaces between words — use the "Characters without spaces" count instead, as those languages are assessed by character count.

Sentence count detects complete sentences by splitting on periods, exclamation marks, and question marks. Paragraph count detects distinct text blocks separated by blank lines. In standard academic writing, a paragraph typically contains 3–5 sentences. Monitoring both helps identify overly long paragraphs (more than 8–10 sentences) that can hurt readability.