Because I’ve been making posts via a CMS, I no longer open the good ol’ MS Word as often as I used to. I do launch the program when I need to count the number of words in an article. But, heck, why bother when online tools abound on the Internet? Trust the geeks out there to make word counting a whole lot easier.

I found these tools after a quick search:

Word Count Tool
If you need a free and fast online word counting tool, go to Word Count Tool. Just paste the text and click SUBMIT. I use this tool when I’m writing sponsored reviews that require a minimum number of words.

Word Count Tool counts

* Words made out of the alphabet.
* Words made from a combination of alphabets and numbers.
* Words with an apostrophe ( ‘ ) and a hyphen ( - ).

It doesn’t count words starting with an apostrophe ( ‘ ) or a hypen ( - ); words made solely from numbers (e.g. o 1234 or o 1234a); and HTML tags.

Word Counter Widget
Writers on Mac can download the Word Counter Widget. It’s a dashboard widget for Macintosh OS X. It provides word counts and character counts and can also count the number of instances of a specified word or phrase. Its customizable options include:

* Counting all words or only words above a specified length
* Counting all characters or all characters without spaces
* Counting hyphenated words as a single word or as separate words
* Counting text instances in a case-sensitive or case-insensitive manner

Google Docs
Using your Google account, go to Google Docs, open a file, click the Tools menu and select Word Count. Easy as pie. : )

What other word counting tools do you use?