Word & character counter

What this word and character counter does

Paste or type any text and seven numbers update on every keystroke: words, characters, characters without spaces, sentences, paragraphs, lines and an estimated reading time. The counts are Unicode-aware, so accented letters, CJK text and emoji are measured as the characters you see rather than as JavaScript’s UTF-16 code units. It is built for the everyday jobs of fitting copy into a limit, checking an essay or article length, and estimating how long a page takes to read.

How to use it

1. Paste into the Text box or start typing. There is no button; every stat updates live.
2. Read the tiles: Words, Characters, Characters (no spaces), Sentences, Paragraphs, Lines, Reading time.
3. Trim or extend the text until the number you care about fits. For limits like tweets or meta descriptions use Characters (with spaces).

How each number is computed

Stat	Rule
Words	Runs of non-whitespace, after trimming. don't is 1 word, well - known is 3.
Characters	Every Unicode code point, including spaces and newlines.
Characters (no spaces)	Same, after removing all whitespace (spaces, tabs, newlines).
Sentences	Terminators ., !, ?, 。, ！, ？ followed by whitespace or end of text.
Paragraphs	Blocks separated by at least one blank line. Single line breaks do not start a new paragraph.
Lines	Newline-separated lines, counting \n, \r\n and \r. Empty text is 0 lines.
Reading time	ceil(words / 200) minutes, minimum 1.

Reading-time formula

Published estimates for silent reading speed range from about 200 to 300 words per minute for adults reading English on screen. Medium uses 265 wpm and adds 12 seconds per image; many SEO plugins use 200 to 250. This tool uses 200, which slightly overestimates time for simple prose and is closer to right for technical content with code blocks. To apply a different speed, divide the word count yourself: 1,200 words is 6 minutes at 200 wpm, 5 minutes at 240, and 4.5 at 265. Round up to whole minutes; nobody wants a “3.7 min read” label.

Common length limits

All limits below are measured in characters with spaces unless stated.

Where	Limit	Notes
HTML title tag	about 60	Google truncates by pixel width (around 600px), not characters; 50 to 60 is safe.
Meta description	about 155	Also pixel-based; 120 to 155 characters keeps it intact on desktop, 120 on mobile.
X / Twitter post	280	URLs always count as 23; emoji count as 2 toward the 280 (weighted counting).
Instagram caption	2,200	Only the first 125 show before “more”.
LinkedIn post	3,000	About 210 shown before “see more”.
YouTube title	100	70 or fewer avoids truncation in search.
Open Graph title	60 to 90	Facebook shows up to about 88.
Git commit subject	50	Soft limit; 72 hard wrap for the body.
SMS (GSM-7)	160	70 if the message contains any non-GSM character such as an emoji or curly quote.
Google Ads headline	30	Description lines are 90.

For titles and descriptions, this tool gives you the character count; the pixel width depends on the glyphs. Wide capitals such as W and M eat more room than i and l, so a 58-character title full of capitals can still be cut.

Typical word counts

Content	Words
Tweet-length thought	40 to 50
Product description	100 to 300
Blog post (short)	600 to 800
Blog post (ranking long-form)	1,500 to 2,500
News article	500 to 800
College essay	500 to 650
Novel chapter	1,500 to 5,000
Double-spaced A4 page, 12pt	about 275

Related tools and snippets

• Lorem ipsum generator to produce text of an exact length, then verify it here.
• Text diff to see what changed when you cut copy down to fit a limit.
• Case converter for turning a counted headline into Title Case.
• Truncate text multiline to clamp text with CSS when you cannot control its length.
• HTML entities if the description will be inserted into a meta tag and contains quotes or ampersands.