Word & Character Counter
Count Words, Characters, Sentences, Paragraphs and Reading Time
Type or paste your text below. The counts update live, and nothing is uploaded.Find Your Keyword(s) Frequency
What This Word Counter Measures
Type or paste into the box above and the counts update as you go: words, characters with and without spaces, sentences, paragraphs, and an estimated reading time. Nothing is submitted anywhere — the counting is JavaScript running in your own tab, which is what makes it safe to paste an unpublished draft or a client document into it.
The counts are live, so you can watch a paragraph cross a limit while you are editing rather than discovering it afterwards. That is the whole point of a browser-based counter: it turns a length constraint from something you check at the end into something you write inside.
How a Word Is Counted
"Word count" sounds unambiguous and is not. Different tools give different answers for the same text, and the disagreement is always about edge cases:
- Hyphenated words. Is state-of-the-art one word or four? This counter treats it as one, which matches Microsoft Word and Google Docs.
- Numbers and dates.1,250 and 3 May 2026 count as one and three words respectively — anything separated by whitespace is a token.
- Contractions.don't is one word, not two.
- URLs and email addresses. One word each, because they contain no spaces — which can make a technical document look shorter than it reads.
- Em dashes and ellipses. Punctuation attached to a word does not create a new one.
If your count disagrees with another tool by one or two, one of these is almost always the reason. If it disagrees by a lot, check for a trailing block of whitespace or a hidden element that came along with a paste from a web page.
Characters with and against spaces
Two character counts are shown because two different systems care about different ones. Twitter, SMS and most database columns count every character including spaces. Some academic and publishing guidelines count characters excluding spaces. When a limit is quoted to you, it is worth asking which — the difference on a 500-word text is around 80 characters, which is more than enough to fail a check.
Common Length Limits, in One Place
Most people arrive at a word counter because something has a maximum. These are the limits that come up most often.
| Where | Limit | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Page title tag | 50–60 chars | Google truncates on pixel width, not character count — capitals run wider. |
| Meta description | 140–160 chars | Not a ranking factor, but it is the sales pitch in the result. |
| X / Twitter post | 280 chars | Links count as a fixed 23 characters regardless of real length. |
| SMS | 160 chars | Drops to 70 if the message contains any non-GSM character, including an emoji. |
| LinkedIn post | 3,000 chars | Only the first ~140 show before "see more". |
| UCAS personal statement | 4,000 chars | Including spaces, and 47 lines maximum. |
| Journal abstract | 150–300 words | Varies by publisher; check the author guidelines. |
| Blog post that ranks | no rule | Length correlates with rankings; it does not cause them. Write to the question. |
Where the Reading Time Estimate Comes From
The estimate divides your word count by 238 words per minute, the median silent reading rate for adults reading English prose — a figure from Brysbaert's 2019 meta-analysis of 190 studies covering more than 18,000 participants.
Treat it as an order of magnitude rather than a promise. Real reading speed varies by a factor of two or more between individuals, and it drops sharply for technical material, unfamiliar vocabulary, or anything the reader is studying rather than skimming. A dense page of legal text at 238 words per minute is a fiction. It remains useful as a relative measure: if your article says 22 minutes and your audience reads on a phone during a commute, that is worth knowing before you publish.
Writing to a Length Without Padding
When a piece is over the limit, the instinct is to delete sentences. Usually the better move is to compress them, because most drafts carry 10–20% redundancy that can go without losing a single idea:
- Cut intensifiers — very, really, quite, actually. They almost never survive a reading aloud.
- Replace nominalisations with verbs: make a decision becomes decide, provide assistance becomes help.
- Delete the throat-clearing opening. First paragraphs frequently start one sentence before the actual point.
- Prefer the active voice; it is normally shorter as well as clearer.
When a piece is under the limit, resist the temptation to inflate it. Padding is obvious to readers and, in an SEO context, does nothing — a thin page stretched to 1,500 words is still a thin page. Add another example, another objection answered, another practical detail; do not add adjectives.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is my text uploaded anywhere?
No. The counting runs in JavaScript in your browser. Nothing is transmitted to a server, stored or logged, which is why you can safely paste an unpublished draft, a contract or a client document. Close the tab and it is gone.
Why does my word count differ from Microsoft Word?
Almost always because of what each tool treats as a word. Word counts hyphenated compounds as one word and so does this counter, but the two differ on things like text inside footnotes, headers, text boxes and tracked changes — content this counter never sees, because you pasted only the body. A gap of a few words is normal; a large gap usually means some of the document did not make it into the paste.
Does this count characters for a Twitter or SMS limit?
It gives you an accurate character count, which is the right starting point, but both platforms apply their own rules on top. X counts every link as 23 characters regardless of its real length. SMS drops from 160 characters to 70 the moment a message contains any character outside the GSM 7-bit alphabet — a curly quote or an emoji is enough to trigger it.
How many words should a blog post be?
There is no target that works across topics. Studies showing that longer posts rank better are measuring correlation: thorough answers tend to be long, and thorough answers rank. The useful question is whether you have answered the query completely, and the useful test is whether a reader who arrived with that question leaves without needing another page.
What is the difference between this and the keyword density checker?
Different questions. This page answers "how long is this?" — the measurement a writer needs while working to a limit. The keyword density checker answers "what proportion of this document is my target phrase?" — the measurement an SEO needs while auditing a draft. If you want to know which words you lean on without naming one first, the word frequency counter ranks every term in the text.