Word & Character Counter
Count words, characters, sentences, paragraphs and reading time as you type, entirely in your browser.
A word and character counter tells you, in real time, how much text you have written. It counts words, characters with and without spaces, sentences, paragraphs, lines and an estimated reading time, updating on every keystroke. That is useful far beyond idle curiosity: essays, university applications, meta descriptions, tweets, SMS messages, ad copy and abstracts all come with hard limits, and going over can mean truncation or rejection.
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Frequently asked questions
How is a word defined?
What is the difference between the two character counts?
Does an emoji count as one character?
How is reading time calculated?
Is my text uploaded anywhere?
How are sentences and paragraphs detected?
Is there a maximum length?
About Word & Character Counter
The definitions matter, because tools disagree. Here a word is any run of non-whitespace characters, which matches how most writing platforms count. Characters are counted by Unicode code point, so an accented letter or an emoji counts as one visible character rather than the two or more bytes it occupies on disk. Sentences are detected by terminal punctuation (period, question mark, exclamation mark), and paragraphs by blank lines between blocks of text. Reading time is words divided by a reading speed you can adjust; 200 to 250 words per minute is typical for adult silent reading.
Everything runs locally in your browser. Nothing you type is sent anywhere, so it is safe for drafts, confidential documents and unpublished work. There is no limit on length beyond your device's memory, and the counts stay responsive even for long articles.
Why word limits exist
Word and character limits are older than computers. Telegraph companies charged by the word, which is why telegrams were famously terse, and newspaper columns had fixed line counts that sub-editors had to fill exactly. The discipline of writing to a count is a craft in itself: Ernest Hemingway's reputed six-word story is the extreme case of saying more with less.
On the modern web, limits are everywhere but often invisible. A search engine result snippet shows roughly 155 to 160 characters of a meta description before truncating with an ellipsis. A standard SMS is 160 characters because of the 7-bit GSM encoding it was designed around. Knowing the count before you publish is the difference between a message that lands whole and one that gets cut off mid-thought.