Word and character counter
Counts words, characters, sentences, paragraphs and reading time as you type, against the limit you are actually writing to, whether that is a tweet, a meta description or an essay.
- Seven counts at once, updating on every keystroke
- Characters with and without spaces, because the limit you are given is usually one or the other
- Reading time from a real words-per-minute figure, not a guess
- Nothing is sent anywhere, paste a draft you would not email
Against the limits
Counted with spaces, which is how every one of these platforms counts. Pages are at 250 words, double-spaced, 12pt, one-inch margins; single-spaced is about half as many.
Which count you actually need
Almost every limit you are given is a character limit, and almost every limit you are given is ambiguous about spaces. A meta description is 155–160 characters with spaces. A database column of 255 is with spaces too. Academic word counts are words, and usually exclude the bibliography, which no counter can know about.
So both are here, side by side, rather than one of them and a note. The gap between them is roughly a sixth of the text, which is more than enough to fail a limit you thought you had met.
What counts as a word
A run of characters between whitespace. That means "don't" is one word, "state-of-the-art" is one, and "10 000" is two, which is what Word and Google Docs do too, and why the numbers here agree with them for ordinary prose.
Where counters disagree is punctuation floating alone and numbers with separators. If a submission has a hard limit, count with the tool the marker will use; the difference is normally under a percent, but a percent of 5,000 is fifty words.
Sentences, paragraphs and why they are estimates
Sentences are counted at full stops, question marks and exclamation marks. Abbreviations ending in a full stop therefore read as sentence ends, and "Dr. Smith went to Washington." counts as two. There is no honest way around that without a dictionary, so the number is useful as a trend and not as a fact.
Paragraphs are blank-line separated. A document written with single line breaks between paragraphs will report one enormous paragraph, which is itself worth knowing.
Reading time
Calculated at 200 words a minute, which is the low end of the usual adult range for ordinary prose and therefore the safe end for a talk. Read aloud, expect closer to 130, so a five-minute slot is around 650 spoken words, not a thousand.
The limits worth knowing
A page title wants about 60 characters before search engines cut it. A meta description wants 155. A tweet is 280. An SMS is 160 before it splits into two. A LinkedIn headline is 220. None of these are enforced here, the counter simply tells you the number, and you know which limit you are writing to.
Questions
Is my text uploaded?
No. Everything is counted in this tab as you type, and nothing is sent anywhere or kept when you close it.
Do the counts match Microsoft Word?
For ordinary prose, yes. Both split words on whitespace. Documents heavy in numbers, hyphens or footnotes can differ slightly.
Why is "characters without spaces" different by so much?
Because about a sixth of ordinary English is spaces. If a limit says "characters" and does not say which, assume it includes them.
Does it count a hyphenated word as one or two?
One. "State-of-the-art" is a single run of characters between spaces.
How is reading time worked out?
200 words a minute, the low end of the usual adult range. Reading aloud is slower, closer to 130.
Why does my sentence count look wrong?
Abbreviations. Any full stop ends a sentence as far as a counter is concerned, so "Dr." and "e.g." inflate the number.
Is there a size limit?
Not a real one. It counts a whole novel without complaint, because nothing is being uploaded.