Word counter

How words are counted

A word is any run of characters between spaces or line breaks. Sentences end at a full stop, question mark or exclamation mark, and paragraphs are separated by a blank line. Reading time uses the average adult silent reading speed of about 238 words per minute.

How to use the word counter

Type or paste your text into the box. The counts are worked out when you press the button and show the number of words, characters with spaces, characters without spaces, sentences, paragraphs and an estimated reading time. Nothing leaves your browser: the text is not uploaded or saved, so it is safe to check drafts, private notes and client work.

How each number is counted

• Words are runs of characters separated by spaces or line breaks, so “well-known” is one word and “e.g.” is one word.
• Characters count every character in the text, including spaces and punctuation. The second figure removes all whitespace.
• Sentences end at a full stop, question mark or exclamation mark followed by a space or the end of the text.
• Paragraphs are blocks separated by a blank line.
• Reading time divides the word count by 238 words a minute, the average adult silent reading speed, and rounds to the nearest minute (never less than 1).

Example

“Standard deviation measures spread. A small value means tightly packed data!” has 11 words, 76 characters with spaces (66 without) and 2 sentences. At 238 words a minute that is a few seconds of reading, so the tool shows 1 minute, its minimum.

Reading time and speaking time

At 238 words a minute, 1,000 words take about 4 minutes to read and 2,000 words about 8 minutes. Speaking is slower: presenters usually speak at roughly 130 to 150 words a minute, so a 5-minute talk is about 650 to 750 words. These are averages, and technical or dense text reads more slowly than light prose.

Typical length limits

• A post on X (Twitter): 280 characters.
• A text message (SMS) in the standard GSM alphabet: 160 characters per part.
• A search-result meta description: about 155 to 160 characters before it is cut off, though the limit depends on pixel width.
• A double-spaced page: roughly 250 to 300 words.

Always check the exact limit on the platform you are using, because limits change and some count emoji, links or non-Latin characters differently.

Using the counts when you edit

The counts are most useful against a target. Trim a draft that is 120 words over by looking at the paragraph count first (long paragraphs hide the easiest cuts), then at sentences: a sentence count that is low for the word count means long, heavy sentences. Check titles against a limit of about 60 characters and meta descriptions against about 155 to 160, and keep the character count without spaces in mind for forms that count that way.

Common mistakes and limits

• Different tools count differently. Hyphenated words, numbers and abbreviations are counted by rule, so two counters can differ by a word or two.
• Emoji and some symbols count as two characters in this counter, because it counts the way browsers store text (UTF-16 code units).
• Sentence counts are approximate. Abbreviations such as “Dr.” or decimals like “3.5” can look like sentence ends.
• It counts words, not quality. Check readability and accuracy yourself.