Word Counter
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Paste or type text and get an instant count of words, characters, characters without spaces, sentences, and lines. Updates as you type.
What counts as a word
Words are split on whitespace. Any sequence of non-whitespace characters counts as one word: "don't" is one word, "state-of-the-art" is one word, "www.example.com" is one word.
Numbers, code identifiers, and symbols count as words when surrounded by whitespace. A URL on its own line is one word regardless of its length.
What the counts are useful for
Character limits — Twitter/X: 280, SMS: 160, meta descriptions: 150–160, LinkedIn connection messages: 300.
Word count targets — short blog posts: 600–1,200, long-form articles: 2,000–4,000, technical documentation pages: varies widely.
Line counts — checking data file lengths, verifying that generated output has the expected number of entries.
Sentence counts — rough readability check; very long average sentence length correlates with lower readability scores.
Limitations
This tool counts surface-level tokens. It does not understand language. A code snippet and a prose paragraph with the same word count produce identical statistics.
Sentence detection splits on . ! ? — abbreviations and decimal numbers may inflate the sentence count.
Common character and word limits by platform
Knowing target limits before you write is more efficient than trimming after. These are the most commonly referenced limits in practice.
Social and messaging limits apply strictly — platforms truncate or reject content that exceeds them. SEO limits are recommendations: exceeding them does not break anything but may result in truncation in search results.
280 characters (counts Unicode code points, not bytes)160 characters (GSM-7); 70 characters (Unicode/emoji)300 characters150–160 characters recommended (Google truncates around 155)50–60 characters (≈ 600px render width)200 characters before truncation in most embeds600–1,200 words1,500–3,000 words for competitive topicsReading time estimation
A common rule of thumb: average adult reading speed is 200–250 words per minute for English prose. At 250 wpm, a 1,000-word article takes approximately 4 minutes to read.
Technical content, code-heavy documentation, or unfamiliar subject matter typically reads more slowly — 150–200 wpm is a more realistic estimate for developer docs.
Many publishing platforms display estimated reading time. To calculate it manually: divide word count by your assumed reading speed. The word count shown here is the numerator in that calculation.
~2 min read at 250 wpm~4 min read at 250 wpm~8 min read at 250 wpm~5 min read at 200 wpm for 1,000 wordsFrequently Asked Questions
- Why does the word count differ from my word processor?
- Different tools define "word" differently. Microsoft Word splits on a wider set of delimiters and treats hyphenated compounds differently. Small discrepancies are normal.
- Does it count words in code?
- Yes, it counts whitespace-separated tokens. In code, identifiers, operators, and keywords each count as words. The count reflects token density, not linguistic word count.
- Is there a maximum text size?
- There is no hard limit enforced by the tool. Very large pastes (hundreds of thousands of words) may be slow to process in the browser, but typical text sizes work immediately.
- Does it count characters as bytes or Unicode code points?
- Characters are counted as Unicode code points via string.length in JavaScript. For ASCII text this matches byte count. For text with emoji or multi-byte characters, string.length counts UTF-16 code units, which may differ from byte count or visual character count.
- How do I check whether my text fits a specific character limit?
- Paste the text here and watch the "Characters" count. This matches most platform counters, which count Unicode code points rather than bytes. For Twitter specifically, URLs are normalized to 23 characters regardless of actual length, and emoji count as 2 code points on some platforms — check the platform's own counter for final verification.
- Does it count words in languages without spaces, like Japanese or Chinese?
- No. The tool splits on whitespace, so CJK text without spaces counts as one very long "word." For Japanese and Chinese word counting, a language-aware tokenizer is needed. The character count, however, works correctly for all languages.