Count Characters & Words

As you type, it counts words, characters with and without spaces, sentences, paragraphs, spaces, lines and unique words, and shows the average word and sentence length, reading time and speaking time. It also lists your 20 most used keywords or two- and three-word phrases, and shows how your text fits common character limits.

Characters are counted the way you see them, so an emoji such as 👍🏽, a flag or an accented letter counts as one character, even when it is stored as several code points. Spaces, punctuation and line breaks are included in the total; the second figure leaves out all spaces and line breaks.

A word is a run of letters or numbers. Hyphenated words such as well-known, contractions such as it's and numbers such as 3.5 count as one word, and dashes or symbols on their own don't count at all. Letters from every language are recognised, and for Chinese and Japanese, which don't use spaces, the browser's built-in word finder is used.

A sentence ends with a full stop, question mark, exclamation mark or ellipsis, or at the end of the text or a blank line, so a last sentence without a full stop still counts. Decimal numbers such as 3.14 and common abbreviations such as Dr., e.g. and etc. don't end a sentence.

Every line that contains text counts as a paragraph, and empty lines are ignored. Text pasted from a word processor, where each paragraph is one line, and text with blank lines between paragraphs both give the right count. The number of lines, including empty ones, is shown separately.

Reading time assumes an average silent reading speed of 238 words per minute, from a large review of reading research (Brysbaert, 2019). Speaking time assumes 140 words per minute, a typical pace for presentations and speeches. Both are estimates, as people's speeds vary.

Words are converted to lower case and the words on the stopword list, numbers and single letters are left out. The rest are counted and the 20 most frequent are listed. Switch to 2 or 3 words to see the most repeated phrases instead; a phrase must appear at least twice and can't start or end with a stopword. Density is the share of all words in your text taken up by that keyword or phrase.

Stopwords are common words such as the, and, is and of that are left out of the keyword list so it shows the words that carry meaning. The tool starts with 178 English stopwords. Open the Stopwords panel to remove any you want counted or add your own, such as your brand name. Your changes are remembered in your browser, and Reset brings back the default list.

Your text is never sent to a server: all counting happens in your browser. If Remember my text in this browser is switched on, your text is saved in your browser's local storage so it's still there when you come back. It never leaves your device, and you can switch the option off to stop saving it.

Anything where length matters: checking a post against a platform's character limit, meeting a word count for an essay or assignment, writing meta descriptions and title tags, checking keyword density in SEO content, and estimating how long an article takes to read or a talk takes to give. Set a goal to see a progress bar as you write.

Common limits are 280 characters for a post on X (Twitter), 160 for an SMS message, 2,200 for an Instagram caption, 3,000 for a LinkedIn post and 5,000 for a YouTube description. For SEO, keep title tags to about 60 characters and meta descriptions to about 150–160, as search engines shorten longer ones. Email subject lines work best at around 40–60 characters. The Character limits panel checks your text against all of these.

It depends on the topic and the reader. Short posts are typically 500–800 words, standard articles 1,000–1,500 words, and in-depth guides 2,000 words or more. Longer content often ranks well because it covers a topic thoroughly, but quality and relevance matter more than hitting a particular number.