Type or paste your text and the numbers update as you write. Your text never leaves this computer.
Pieces separated by spaces count as words, so "e-mail" is one word. This matches programs like Word. For languages written without spaces, such as Chinese and Japanese, a language-aware splitter is used.
It assumes an average of 200 words per minute for reading and 130 for speaking. Real times vary from person to person.
An emoji counts as one character, the way it looks on screen.