Word and Character Counter
Count words, characters, lines and reading time.
About this tool
Paste any text to count words, characters with and without spaces, lines, sentences and paragraphs, its size in bytes, and roughly how long it takes to read. Also lists the words you use most.
How to use it
- Paste or type your text.
- Words, characters, lines, sentences, paragraphs and size update as you type.
- Check the reading time and the list of words you use most.
Questions
- How are words counted?
- Words are detected with the browser’s language-aware segmenter, so punctuation is ignored and languages without spaces between words are handled better than a simple split on spaces.
- Why do characters and bytes differ?
- Characters count what you see. Bytes count UTF-8 storage, where letters with accents take 2 bytes and most emoji take 4. Byte limits matter for things like database columns and SMS.
- How is reading time calculated?
- It assumes an average silent reading speed of 230 words per minute. Technical text is usually read more slowly.
- Why is my word count different from Microsoft Word or Google Docs?
- Each program splits words differently. Here, Unicode word rules apply, so state-of-the-art counts as four words, e-mail as two and a URL as several, while Word counts anything between spaces as one word. Contractions like don’t count as one word in both. On long documents, small differences are normal.
- How are sentences counted?
- Sentences follow Unicode sentence rules: one ends at a period, exclamation mark or question mark followed by a space, and also at a line break. An abbreviation like “Dr.” before a name may be counted as a sentence end, and every heading or list item on its own line counts as a sentence.
- Can I count the words in a file?
- Yes, for plain text formats. Click Open file or drop a .txt, .md, .csv or similar file onto the text box; it is read locally and never uploaded. Word documents and PDFs are binary formats, so copy their text and paste it in instead.
How to count characters with and without spaces
A character counter usually shows two numbers. Characters counts everything, including spaces, tabs and line breaks. Without spaces removes every kind of whitespace first, which is the figure some translation agencies and submission forms ask for. Lines counts line breaks plus one, so a trailing newline adds an empty last line, while Paragraphs counts blocks of text separated by at least one blank line.
Characters are counted as Unicode code points, so most emoji count as one character here, while JavaScript’s length property reports 2 for them. Combined emoji, such as a family or a country flag, are built from several code points and count as more than one. When a platform rejects text that looks short enough, check what it counts: some count code points, some count UTF-16 units and some count bytes.
Character limits for titles, posts and SMS
Some character limits are worth knowing. Google shows roughly 50 to 60 characters of a page title and about 150 to 160 of a meta description before cutting them off. A post on X allows 280 characters, where a link always counts as 23 and many CJK characters count double. Git commit subject lines are best kept under about 50 characters. Paste the text and watch the Characters figure while you edit.
SMS length is measured differently. One message holds 160 characters of the GSM-7 alphabet, but a single character outside it, such as an emoji or a letter like ł, switches the message to UCS-2 and the limit drops to 70. Longer texts are split into parts of 153 or 67 characters. Databases differ too: MySQL VARCHAR(255) counts characters, while other systems limit bytes, which is when the Bytes (UTF-8) figure matters.
How many words is a 5-minute read?
Reading time here assumes 230 words per minute, so a 1,000-word article shows about 4 min 21 sec, and a 5-minute read is roughly 1,150 words. For talks and video scripts, use speaking pace instead, about 130 to 150 words per minute, so a 5-minute talk needs roughly 650 to 750 words. A typical blog post runs 800 to 1,500 words, and a detailed tutorial often goes past 2,000.
The Most used words list shows the ten most frequent words of four letters or more that appear at least twice. Use it to catch repetition: if “really”, “basically” or one product name dominates the list, vary the wording. For SEO copy, it shows whether the phrase you target appears at all and whether it is repeated so often that it reads unnaturally. Counting happens locally, so unpublished drafts stay on your machine.
Something not working, or a result looks wrong? Report a problem with this tool