About the Word Counter
The Word Counter counts words, characters, sentences and paragraphs in real time as you type or paste text. It also estimates how long the text takes to read and to read aloud. Writers, students, marketers and social-media users rely on it to hit length targets — essays, meta descriptions, tweets, abstracts and more.
What each metric means
- Words — runs of non-space characters separated by whitespace.
- Characters — every character including spaces and punctuation. A second figure shows characters excluding spaces.
- Sentences — segments ending in a full stop, question mark or exclamation mark.
- Paragraphs — blocks of text separated by blank lines.
- Reading time — based on an average silent reading speed of 225 words per minute.
- Speaking time — based on an average speaking pace of 130 words per minute.
Common length limits
Useful targets to keep in mind: an SEO title tag is best under ~60 characters and a meta description around 150–160 characters; a tweet/X post allows 280 characters; university essays are usually set in words, not pages. Paste your draft above to check instantly.
Frequently Asked Questions
How are words counted? A word is any sequence of characters separated by spaces, tabs or line breaks. Hyphenated terms like "well-known" count as one word.
Is my text stored anywhere? No. All counting happens locally in your browser using JavaScript — your text is never sent to a server.
How is reading time estimated? Reading time uses 225 words per minute, a widely used average for adult silent reading. Speaking time uses 130 words per minute.
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