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Text & Writing
Word & Character Counter
Words, characters, sentences and reading time, live as you type.
What it does. A word counter tallies words, characters, sentences, paragraphs and estimated reading time in a block of text. This one updates as you type, counts characters with and without spaces, and flags the limits for Google titles, meta descriptions, X posts and LinkedIn — all without sending your text anywhere.
Runs in your browserNothing uploadsNo signupWorks offline
How to use Word & Character Counter
- Paste or type your text into the box. Counting starts on the first keystroke.
- Read the live tiles for words, characters, sentences, paragraphs and reading time.
- Check the platform limit bars to see whether the text fits a title tag, meta description or social post.
How are words actually counted?
A word is counted using the browser’s own Unicode segmentation, not a split on spaces. That distinction matters: splitting on whitespace miscounts hyphenated compounds, em-dash constructions, and every language that does not use spaces between words.
This tool uses Intl.Segmenter with word granularity, the same segmentation engine your browser uses for double-click selection. It counts "state-of-the-art" as one word, treats "don’t" as one word rather than two, and correctly segments Japanese and Chinese text where a naive whitespace split would return a count of one.
Where Intl.Segmenter is unavailable — Safari before 16.4 — the tool falls back to a whitespace-and-punctuation regex, which is accurate to within about 1% for English prose.
What character limits should I write to?
Character limits are where a counter earns its keep. Most are enforced by truncation rather than rejection, so exceeding them costs you the end of your sentence rather than an error message.
| Where | Limit | Counts spaces | What happens if you exceed it |
|---|---|---|---|
| Google title tag | ~60 chars | Yes | Truncated with an ellipsis in results |
| Google meta description | ~155 chars | Yes | Truncated, or Google rewrites it |
| X / Twitter post | 280 chars | Yes | Cannot post |
| LinkedIn post (before "see more") | ~210 chars | Yes | Collapsed behind a link |
| Instagram caption | 2,200 chars | Yes | Cannot post |
| SMS (single segment, GSM-7) | 160 chars | Yes | Splits into billed segments |
| Open Graph og:description | ~200 chars | Yes | Truncated per-platform |
| YouTube title | 100 chars | Yes | Cannot save |
How is reading time calculated?
Reading time uses 238 words per minute, the mean silent-reading rate for adult English prose from Brysbaert’s 2019 meta-analysis of 190 studies. That figure is more defensible than the 200 or 250 wpm most tools use without citation.
Reading time is a rough signal, not a measurement. Technical documentation reads slower — around 150 wpm once code blocks and diagrams interrupt the flow. Fiction reads faster, closer to 260. If your content is dense, add 25% to the estimate before you publish it as a "5 min read" badge.
Why does character count differ between tools?
Three reasons, and all three are about how Unicode is measured.
The first is emoji. A single family emoji is one grapheme a reader sees, but seven code points, and eleven UTF-16 units. JavaScript’s String.length reports 11. This tool reports what a human counts by iterating grapheme clusters.
The second is line endings. Windows uses CRLF (two characters per newline), Unix uses LF (one). Pasting from Notepad can inflate a count by the number of lines in the document.
The third is trailing whitespace, which some tools trim silently and others count. This tool counts what you paste and shows the no-spaces figure separately so you can see both.
Is my text private?
Yes, in a way you can verify rather than take on trust. Open your browser’s developer tools, switch to the Network tab, and type into the box. No request appears, because the counting runs in JavaScript on this page.
This matters more than it sounds. Draft legal filings, unpublished manuscripts, patient notes and internal memos routinely get pasted into free counters that POST the content to a server for processing. That is a disclosure event under GDPR and, for health data, under HIPAA. Local processing removes the question entirely.
Frequently asked questions
Does it count words in real time?
Yes. Every tile updates on each keystroke with no debounce, because the computation is fast enough to run at typing speed on documents into the hundreds of thousands of words.
Can I count words in a PDF or Word document?
Not directly — this tool takes text. Open the document, select all, copy, and paste. For a scanned PDF, run it through the Image to Text tool first to extract selectable text.
How many pages is 1,000 words?
About four pages double-spaced, or two pages single-spaced, in 12pt Times New Roman with one-inch margins. That is the standard US and UK academic setup. Word count is the reliable unit; page count varies with every formatting change.
Does it count words in other languages?
Yes. Unicode segmentation handles German compounds, French elisions, Cyrillic, Greek and Arabic correctly. Chinese, Japanese and Thai are segmented by the browser’s own dictionary rather than by spaces.
What counts as a sentence?
A run of text ending in a period, question mark, exclamation mark or ellipsis. Abbreviations such as "Dr." and "e.g." will slightly inflate the count, which is a limitation shared by every counter that does not run full natural-language parsing.
Is there a limit on how much text I can paste?
The practical ceiling is your device’s memory, not a server quota. Documents over a million words stay responsive on a typical laptop.
Does it store or log what I type?
No. Nothing is written to disk, to localStorage, or to a server. Refreshing the page discards everything.
Guides for Word & Character Counter
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