Word Counter Online: Count Words, Characters, Sentences and Reading Time
Paste or type text into the word counter above and every number updates as you type: words, characters with and without spaces, sentences, lines and an estimated reading time. Nothing is sent to a server, so drafts, contracts and unpublished articles stay on your device. Below is how each number is calculated, which matters when you are writing to a strict limit, and why a different tool may give a slightly different total.
What the counter shows
Words sequences of letters, digits and apostrophes
Characters every character, including spaces and line breaks
Characters without spaces the same, with all whitespace removed
Sentences text ending in ., ! or ?
Lines separated by line breaks
Reading time words ÷ 200, rounded up to whole minutesWord counts are the usual measure for essays, articles and grant applications. Character counts matter for anything with a hard technical limit: search result titles, meta descriptions, social posts, SMS and database fields.
How words are counted
A word is any run of letters, digits and apostrophes, in any alphabet, so don't is one word, café is one word and 2026 is one word. Punctuation, emoji and symbols on their own are not words. A hyphen splits a word, so well-known counts as two; Microsoft Word and Google Docs count it as one. That is the most common reason totals differ by a few words between tools.
Languages without spaces between words, such as Chinese, Japanese and Thai, are counted by runs of characters rather than dictionary words. For those languages, the character count is the more meaningful measure, and it is also how most publishers and translators set limits.
When a limit is strict, as with an essay or an application, check the final text in the tool the limit-setter uses. Word counters agree on ordinary prose but differ on hyphens, dashes without spaces, numbers and URLs.
Character count with and without spaces
Most online limits count characters with spaces: search snippets, social posts and form fields. Translation pricing and some publishing contracts use characters without spaces. Check which one a limit means before trimming your text.
The character count uses the browser's string length. Accented letters count as one character each, but many emoji count as two, and emoji built from several parts, such as family or profession emoji, can count as five or more. That matches how many websites validate form fields, which is why an emoji can use up a limit faster than expected.
Common word and character limits
SEO title tag ~50-60 characters (cut by pixel width, about 600 px)
Meta description ~150-160 characters on desktop
X (Twitter) post 280 characters; links count as 23
SMS 160 characters, or 70 if any emoji or special character is used
Instagram caption 2,200 characters
LinkedIn post 3,000 characters
College application essay often 250-650 words (for example the Common App personal essay)The title and description numbers are approximate because Google cuts by pixel width, so a title full of capital W's runs out of room long before one in lower case. Platform limits change too; check the current figure when a post is close to it. To check one post against several platforms' limits at once, paste it into a social media character counter.
Reading time and speaking time
Reading time is the word count divided by an average reading speed. The counter uses 200 words per minute, a deliberately conservative figure. Research by Marc Brysbaert (2019) puts average adult silent reading of English non-fiction at about 238 words per minute, and technical text with code is read more slowly.
For talks and videos, use speaking speed instead: roughly 130 to 160 words per minute. A 1,500-word script is about ten minutes of speech. To convert a script into minutes at different speaking speeds, use the speaking time calculator on WordCounterFast.
Using the counter well
Paste the final text, not a draft with notes and headings you will remove. If you are trimming to a limit, cut whole sentences and repeated phrases first. Readers notice missing articles and conjunctions more than they notice a shorter paragraph.
For SEO copy, count the visible text rather than the HTML. Paste the rendered text, or strip tags first, so markup is not counted as characters.
The sentence and line counts are useful beyond limits. Divide words by sentences and you get the average sentence length, a quick way to find the paragraph that needs splitting. Line counts matter for subtitles, poems and anything else laid out line by line.
Frequently asked questions
How do I count the words in a text?
Paste the text into the word counter above. Words, characters, sentences, lines and reading time update instantly as you type or edit.
Does the character count include spaces?
The counter shows both: characters including spaces and line breaks, and characters without any whitespace. Most online limits count characters with spaces.
Why is my word count different in Word or Google Docs?
Tools define words differently. This counter splits hyphenated words such as "well-known" into two, while Word and Google Docs count them as one. Numbers, URLs and dashes without spaces are other common differences.
How is reading time calculated?
The word count is divided by 200 words per minute and rounded up to whole minutes. Average adults read non-fiction at around 238 words per minute, so the estimate is slightly conservative.
Why do emoji count as more than one character?
The counter uses the browser's string length, where many emoji take two units and combined emoji take several. Many websites count characters the same way, so it reflects how form limits behave.
Is my text stored or uploaded?
No. Counting happens in your browser and the text never leaves your device.