Word & Character Counter
Paste or type below and the counts update as you go. Everything stays in this tab — no autosave, no account, nothing sent anywhere. Close the page and the text is gone.
Platform character limits
Most used words
- Nothing yet.
How each number is counted
Counting sounds trivial until you compare two tools and get different answers. Here is exactly what this one does, so you can tell whether it matches whatever you are being graded against:
- Words — runs of non-whitespace separated by spaces, tabs or line breaks. "State-of-the-art" counts as one word; "e.g." counts as one. This matches Microsoft Word closely.
- Characters — every character including spaces, punctuation and line breaks. This is the number social platforms count.
- Sentences — segments ending in
.,!,?or…. Abbreviations like "Dr." inflate this slightly; no tool gets it perfect without understanding the text. - Paragraphs — blocks separated by a blank line. Single line breaks within a block do not start a new paragraph.
Reading time and speaking time
Reading time assumes 238 words per minute, the median for adults reading non-fiction on screen found in a meta-analysis of reading-rate studies. It is a decent default, but treat it as a rough signal: dense technical writing runs slower, and a reader skimming for one fact runs much faster.
Speaking time uses 140 words per minute, which is a comfortable presentation pace. Conversational speech runs faster, around 160. If you are timing a talk, read a paragraph aloud with a stopwatch and calibrate — individual pace varies more than any average suggests.
Word counts that actually matter
A few reference points worth knowing:
- Title tag: roughly 60 characters before Google truncates it in search results. The real limit is pixel width, not characters, so capital letters cost you.
- Meta description: about 160 characters. Google frequently rewrites it anyway, but a good one still improves click-through.
- University essays: most allow ±10% of the stated count. Confirm whether references and footnotes are included — policies differ and the penalty for guessing wrong is real.
On the perennial question of blog post length: there is no magic number. Longer posts correlate with ranking because thorough coverage and depth correlate with ranking, not because word count is itself a signal. Padding a 700-word answer to 2,000 words makes it worse, not better.
Frequently asked questions
Does this match Microsoft Word’s word count?
Very closely for ordinary prose. Differences appear with hyphenated compounds, numbers with units, and text containing symbols. If a hard limit is being enforced, check the final figure in whichever tool the person marking it will use.
Is my text saved or sent anywhere?
No. Everything runs in this tab and nothing is transmitted or stored — not even in your browser’s local storage. Closing or reloading the page discards the text.
Can I count words in a Word document or PDF?
Open the file, select all the text, and paste it here. The tool works on plain text, so formatting, images and page furniture are ignored — which is usually what you want for a clean count.
Why is the sentence count slightly off?
Abbreviations ending in a period ("Dr.", "etc.", "U.S.") are counted as sentence endings, and decimal numbers can have the same effect. Splitting sentences perfectly requires understanding the text, not just its punctuation.
Are spaces counted as characters?
Both figures are shown. "Characters" includes spaces and line breaks — that is the number Twitter, LinkedIn and SMS count. "No spaces" strips all whitespace, which some academic and print specifications ask for.
Last updated September 19, 2026