Word & character counter

Counts that update as you type

Paste or write, and the word count, character count (with and without spaces), sentence and paragraph counts, and an estimated reading time all update instantly. Everything is calculated in your browser, so even a long document stays fast and completely private — nothing is uploaded. The reading-time estimate assumes roughly 200 words per minute, a typical adult pace for general text.

Which count actually matters

Different limits care about different units. Essays and articles are usually set in words; social posts and SMS in characters; meta descriptions and headlines often in characters too. Knowing which one your target uses saves a lot of guesswork — a "280 character" limit and a "280 word" limit are wildly different things. Having all the counts visible at once means you can write to whichever constraint applies without switching tools.

Handy for more than essays

Beyond hitting a word target, a live counter is useful for estimating how long something will take to read (helpful when writing for an audience), trimming a bio to a platform's limit, or checking that a chunk of text will fit a fixed space in a design. Because it's instant and private, it's also a safe place to paste sensitive draft text you wouldn't want to run through a server. For reshaping the text itself, the text transformer handles case changes, sorting and find-and-replace.

Which limit uses which unit

• Academic work is normally set in words, though whether footnotes, references and appendices count varies — check the specific brief, because assumptions differ between departments.
• SEO works in characters, and specifically in rendered width: title tags truncate around 60 characters and meta descriptions around 155-160.
• Social platforms count characters, but not always the way you would expect — some count a URL as a fixed length regardless of its actual size, and many count an emoji as two.
• Publishing and freelancing often price by the word, while translation frequently prices by source characters.

Because the units differ, a piece that comfortably fits one limit can badly overshoot another. Watch the count that your particular constraint actually uses.

Reading time is an estimate, not a measurement

The figure here assumes roughly 200 words per minute, a reasonable average for an adult reading general prose. It is a rough guide, and genuinely varies: dense technical or legal material is read far more slowly, often nearer 100-150 words per minute, while familiar light content goes faster.

Reading time also ignores everything that is not prose — code blocks, tables, diagrams and images all take time that a word count cannot see. Treat the estimate as a way to compare two drafts of the same kind of content, not as a promise about any individual reader.

What counts as a word

There is no single correct definition, which is why two tools can disagree on the same text. Counting runs of non-whitespace characters is the usual approach and the one used here. Under it, a hyphenated compound like "well-known" counts as one word, an em dash with spaces around it may count as one, and "e.g." counts as one.

Numbers, standalone symbols and stray punctuation all count as words under a whitespace-based rule, so a document heavy in figures reads slightly higher than a human would tally by hand. Differences of a percent or two between tools are normal and expected; if a hard limit is close, leave yourself margin rather than trusting any single count to the exact word. To clean up text before counting, the line break remover and text transformer handle the tidying.