Free word and character counter
Whether you’re writing an essay with a word limit, crafting a tweet, or optimizing an SEO meta description (keep it under 160 characters!), this free counter gives you live stats as you type — words, characters, sentences, paragraphs, and estimated reading time.
Who is this for?
Students hitting word counts, marketers writing ad copy, bloggers checking readability, and social-media managers staying within platform limits. The reading-time estimate (based on 200 words per minute) is ideal for planning content length.
Private by design
Your text never leaves your device. Everything is counted instantly in your browser — no uploads, no tracking, no limits. Paste sensitive drafts with total confidence.
Why two word counters disagree about the same text
Word counting sounds like it should have one answer, and it does not. Different tools apply different tokenising rules, so the same paragraph can legitimately produce several different totals.
The main points of disagreement: whether a hyphenated compound such as state-of-the-art counts as one word or four; whether a contraction like don't is one word or two; whether numbers, standalone symbols and currency amounts count at all; and whether text inside URLs, code blocks or footnotes is included. Microsoft Word, Google Docs and most web counters each answer these slightly differently, which is why a 1,000-word target hit in one tool can read as 987 in another.
This counter treats any run of characters separated by whitespace as a word, which is the most common convention on the web and the one most editorial word limits assume. If you are writing to a contract or an academic limit, confirm which tool the person checking will use before you optimise to the last twenty words.
Reading time, and why the number is always approximate
Reading-time estimates divide word count by an assumed words-per-minute rate. The commonly used range for adult silent reading of general prose is roughly 200 to 250 words per minute, and most publishing platforms settle somewhere in that band. It is an average across readers and material, not a measurement of your reader.
Dense technical writing, anything with equations, code or tables, and text in a second language all read considerably slower. Treat the estimate as a rough planning figure — useful for deciding whether an article is a five-minute read or a twenty-minute one, not for anything more precise than that.
Practical limits worth knowing
A few counts that come up constantly in professional work: an SEO title tag is usually truncated by Google around 55 to 60 characters, and a meta description around 155 to 160. A tweet is 280 characters. A LinkedIn post shows roughly the first 210 characters before the See more fold. SMS messages split at 160 characters for plain GSM encoding, and at 70 if the text contains emoji or non-Latin characters, which is why one emoji can double the cost of a bulk send.
Character count including spaces is the figure almost every one of those limits uses, so that is the number to watch rather than words.
Frequently asked questions
Is my text uploaded anywhere when I paste it here?
No. All counting happens in your browser as you type. Nothing is transmitted, stored, logged or retained, and there is no server request involved. You can paste confidential drafts, client material or unpublished work without it leaving your device.
How does this tool count words exactly?
Any sequence of characters bounded by whitespace counts as one word. So a hyphenated compound counts as one, a contraction counts as one, and a standalone number counts as one. Line breaks and multiple spaces are treated as single separators and do not inflate the total.
Why is the reading time different from other sites?
Because the assumed reading speed differs. Platforms pick a rate somewhere between roughly 200 and 250 words per minute, and a fifty-word-per-minute difference across a 2,000-word article shifts the estimate by about two minutes. None of them is wrong; they are using different averages.
Is there a size limit on the text I can paste?
There is no imposed limit. Very large documents — well beyond a hundred thousand words — may make the live recount feel sluggish on older devices, since counting re-runs on every keystroke, but nothing is rejected or truncated.
Does it count characters with or without spaces?
Both figures are shown separately, because different limits use different conventions. Social platforms and SMS count characters including spaces; some publishing and translation rates are quoted excluding them. Check which one applies before you edit to fit. For related work, see our AI prompt token calculator, which measures the same text the way a language model does.