Word & character counter

Type or paste text into the box and every number updates as you type. There is no button to press and nothing to wait for, because the counting runs entirely in your browser rather than on a server.

Line endings are normalised first, so text copied from Windows, macOS or a web form produces the same counts. Characters are counted as whole characters a reader perceives, which means an emoji, a flag, or a letter with an accent each count as one. Words are found with Unicode word segmentation, so languages that do not separate words with spaces are still counted sensibly.

Each statistic is defined plainly, so you know exactly what is being measured:

Words

Word-like runs of characters, separated by spaces or punctuation.

Characters

Every character including spaces, tabs and line breaks.

Characters without spaces

The same total with all whitespace removed.

Sentences

Runs of text ending in a full stop, question mark, exclamation mark or their full-width equivalents.

Paragraphs

Blocks of text separated by one or more blank lines.

Lines

Newline-separated lines, matching what you see in the box.

Reading time

An estimate from the word count at a stated reading speed (see below).

The two character counts differ by the number of spaces, tabs and line breaks in your text. Which one you need depends on where the text is going. Most social platforms and SEO fields count characters with spaces, so that is usually the number to watch. Some systems with strict field widths count without spaces. The tool shows both so you never have to guess.

Reading time is the word count divided by 200 words per minute, a conservative average for adult silent reading of prose, then rounded to whole seconds. It is an estimate meant for rough planning, such as sizing a blog post or a script. It is not a measurement of your own reading speed, and it does not account for how dense or technical the writing is.

Speaking time uses 130 words per minute, a steady pace for a talk or a video voice-over. Nervous speakers run faster and careful ones slower, so rehearse with a timer for anything that has a hard slot.

Each bar in the tool is checked against the limit the platform publishes, counted the way that platform describes. Platforms do not all count alike: X weighs emoji and links differently, Threads counts emoji by their bytes, and YouTube descriptions are measured in bytes. The X and Threads bars follow those published rules closely, but the apps themselves are the final word.

Search engines publish no fixed length for page titles or meta descriptions; they cut snippets by pixel width, so those are not shown as limits here.

This counter reports only what it computes: words, characters with and without spaces, sentences, paragraphs, lines, estimated reading and speaking time, and room left against published platform limits. It does not check grammar, assign a readability grade, or analyse keyword density. The sentence and paragraph counts are structural, based on punctuation and blank lines, not on meaning. If a number looks surprising, it is almost always because the text uses punctuation or spacing in a way the definitions above explain.

Your text is processed in the browser and is never uploaded, logged or stored on a server. That makes the tool safe for unpublished drafts, client work and confidential copy. After the page has loaded once, it also keeps working offline.