Word Counter

How words and characters are counted

The word counter counts every run of letters or digits separated by spaces or punctuation as one word. Apostrophes, hyphens, dots and commas inside a word do not split it, so “don’t”, “e-mail”, “3.5” and “12:30” are one word each. This matches Microsoft Word and Google Docs in almost every case; small differences usually come from stand-alone dashes and symbols.

Characters with and without spaces

The Characters count includes letters, digits, punctuation and spaces, but not line breaks. No spaces leaves the spaces out as well. Emoji and combined characters such as 👍🏽 count as one character, just as you see them. When an essay, application form, résumé or ad gives a character limit, it usually means characters with spaces; if you are unsure, stay under both numbers.

Sentences and paragraphs

Every part that ends with a period, exclamation mark, question mark or ellipsis is a sentence. Dots inside numbers such as “3.5” do not end a sentence, but an abbreviation like “Dr.” followed by a space can. Every line that contains text is a paragraph; empty lines are ignored.

Reading and speaking time

Reading time assumes an average silent reading speed of 238 words per minute, the figure found in a large 2019 review of reading studies. Speaking time uses 140 words per minute, a comfortable pace for a talk or presentation, so a 5-minute speech needs about 700 words. The page estimate uses 500 words per single-spaced page in 12-point type; double spacing doubles the page count.

Social media and SMS character limits

An X (Twitter) post allows 280 characters, an Instagram caption 2,200, an Instagram bio 150 and a LinkedIn post 3,000. X counts every link as 23 characters whatever its length, so posts with links are approximate. Google usually cuts a page title after about 60 characters and a meta description after 155–160. For SMS, plain Latin text fits 160 characters in one message, but any character outside the GSM alphabet, such as an emoji or curly quotes, switches the message to Unicode and the limit drops to 70 characters. Longer messages are split into parts of 153 or 67 characters. The counter detects this and shows how many messages will be sent.

Most used words

The list shows the ten words you use most, with their count and share of all words (keyword density). Common words such as “the”, “and” and “of” are hidden by default; untick the box to include them. Possessive “’s” is dropped, so “Anna” and “Anna’s” count as the same word. It is a quick way to spot a word you repeat too often, or to check how often a keyword appears in a blog post.

Your text is never sent to a server; all counting happens in your browser. While Save on this device is on, the text is kept in this browser, so it survives a refresh or a closed tab. On a shared computer, turn it off and the saved text is deleted at once.