Word and Character Counter

Paste or type text into the box and this tool counts words, characters with spaces, characters without spaces and sentences, then gives the average sentence length and an estimated reading time. A small table also tells you whether the whole text fits a 60-character title tag, a 160-character meta description and a 280-character post on X.

Writers use it to hit essay and article targets, students to check assignment limits, and marketers to fit titles, ad copy and social posts. It also works as a reading-time calculator: paste a full article and the reading time line gives minutes at 238 words per minute.

Counting rules differ slightly between tools. This counter treats anything separated by whitespace as a word, so a spaced dash "—" counts as one word, and it counts a sentence wherever it finds a full stop, question mark or exclamation mark. Word processors may disagree by a word or two on the same text. To check how easy your text is to read, run it through the Flesch reading ease calculator.

The 238 wpm figure comes from Marc Brysbaert's 2019 meta-analysis of 190 reading-rate studies, which found adults read English nonfiction silently at about 238 words per minute and fiction at about 260. Reading aloud is slower, roughly 130–160 wpm for a presentation, so divide by 150 instead to time a speech. Decimal points and abbreviations such as "e.g." also count as sentence breaks, so the sentence count is an estimate for technical text.

Character limits are counted including spaces unless stated otherwise. Search engines truncate titles and descriptions by pixel width rather than a fixed character count, so the figures for those are practical guides, not hard rules.

Page estimates assume 12-point type with 1-inch margins; fonts, headings and paragraph breaks change them noticeably. Reading times use 238 wpm for silent reading and 150 wpm for speaking aloud. To measure your own speed at the keyboard rather than reading, try the typing speed calculator.

• Hyphens and dashes: "long-term" is one word here; "long – term" with spaces around the dash is three.
• Numbers, URLs and emails: each counts as one word if it has no spaces.
• Footnotes, headings and captions: they are counted if they are in the box. Many essay limits exclude references and titles, so paste only the body text.
• Characters: emoji and some accented letters can count as two characters in this tool and on some platforms, because of how they are stored.