Word and Character Counter — Live Counts, Reading Time and Limits

1. 1Paste or type your textPut your text into the box. Counting starts immediately and updates on every keystroke — there is nothing to submit.
2. 2Read the countsWords, characters, characters without spaces, sentences and paragraphs appear together, with reading and speaking time underneath.
3. 3Check it against a limitThe limit bars show the room left in a page title, meta description, SMS message or social post, and report the overage once you pass one.

Five counts update live as you type: words, total characters, characters excluding whitespace, sentences and paragraphs. Alongside them are average word length, the longest word, and estimated times to read the text silently and aloud.

The frequency table lists the eight most-used words, skipping anything under three letters and common function words such as “the” and “and”. It is the quickest way to spot a word you have leaned on too heavily, which is hard to notice by reading.

A word is a run of letters, digits, apostrophes and hyphens. That keeps compounds like “well-known” and contractions like “don't” as single words and handles accented and non-Latin scripts correctly, where a plain word-character pattern would split “café” in two. Characters are counted as Unicode code points, so an accented letter counts once.

Sentences are detected from terminal punctuation — full stops, question marks, exclamation marks and their full-width CJK equivalents — so abbreviations such as “Dr.” inflate the count slightly, a limitation of any counter that does not parse grammar. Paragraphs are separated by a blank line.

Search engines truncate page titles at roughly 60 characters and meta descriptions at about 160, though both are measured in pixel width, making those figures practical guides rather than hard cut-offs. A single SMS holds 160 characters in the 7-bit GSM alphabet; one emoji or non-Latin character switches it to 16-bit encoding and drops the limit to 70. X allows 280 on a standard account.

Reading time is the word count divided by 238 words per minute, the average silent reading rate for non-fiction prose in reading-rate meta-analyses. Speaking time uses 140 words per minute, a common delivery rate for presentations and narration; conversation runs faster, at roughly 150 to 160. Both vary with the difficulty of the text — technical material reads considerably slower than narrative prose at the same word count.

Counting is string processing done by your browser as you type. The text stays in the page's memory, is never sent to a server, and is discarded when you close or reload the tab. No autosave, no draft history, no analytics.