Free Word & Character Counter
Count words, characters, sentences, paragraphs, and reading time as you type.
How to use / FAQ
Type or paste your text and every count updates instantly. You’ll see words, characters with and without spaces, sentences, paragraphs, and an estimated reading time — handy for essays, meta descriptions, tweets, or anything with a strict limit. Nothing is saved or sent anywhere; the counting happens live on your device.
Word and character limits are everywhere once you start looking: a college essay capped at 650 words, a tweet at 280 characters, a meta description that gets cut off past 160, an abstract that must fit 250 words. Rather than pasting into a document editor and hunting through menus, keep this page open and watch the numbers move as you trim. The stats update on every keystroke, so you can edit down to a limit interactively instead of counting after the fact.
How is reading time calculated?
It divides your word count by 200 words per minute, a common average for silent adult reading, then rounds to the nearest minute. Spoken delivery is usually slower, around 130 words per minute — so for a speech or video script, expect roughly half again as long as the reading estimate.
What counts as a word or a sentence?
Words are runs of non-space characters; sentences are counted by their ending punctuation (. ! ?). Unusual formatting, decimals, or abbreviations can shift the totals slightly — every counter (including the one in Word or Google Docs) makes slightly different choices, which is why two tools can disagree by a few words on the same text.
Should I use characters with or without spaces?
Both are shown. Characters-with-spaces is what X/Twitter and most SMS limits count; characters-without-spaces is common for academic and translation word limits.
What are the most common length limits?
X/Twitter allows 280 characters, an SMS segment is 160, an Instagram caption tops out at 2,200, and a LinkedIn post at about 3,000. For search results, Google typically displays around 60 characters of a title tag and 155–160 of a meta description before truncating. The Common App college essay is capped at 650 words.
How many words is a page?
A typical manuscript page is about 250 words double-spaced or 500 words single-spaced at 12-point type. So a 1,500-word assignment is roughly six double-spaced pages, and a 60,000-word book manuscript is around 240.
How long should a blog post or article be?
There's no magic number — write what the topic needs. That said, pages that rank well for competitive searches commonly run 1,000–2,000 words, while news items and updates are often 300–600. Reading time matters too: at 200 words per minute, a 1,400-word post is a seven-minute read.
Does it count Markdown or HTML markup?
The tool counts exactly what you paste, so Markdown symbols and HTML tags count as characters and words. For a true reader-facing count, paste the rendered text (copy it from a preview) rather than the raw source.
Is my text stored anywhere?
No. Counting runs entirely in your browser and nothing you type is uploaded or remembered once you close the tab.