Word & Character Counter
Words, characters, reading time — paste your text and get the count instantly. Essays, beware.
📖 How it works & FAQWhat a word counter is for
Most writing you do comes with a limit. A college essay caps at a page count, a meta description wants 155 characters, a tweet stops at 280, and a Reddit or LinkedIn post gets truncated if it runs long. A word counter tells you exactly where you stand so you can trim or expand with intent instead of guessing. Paste your draft and you get words, characters (with and without spaces), sentences, paragraphs, and an estimated reading time updated as you type.
When you'd reach for it
Students checking an assignment against a 500-word minimum. Writers hitting a 1,000-word brief for a client. Job seekers keeping a cover letter to one page. Marketers fitting an ad headline into a strict character budget. Anyone who has ever pasted text into a form only to see "too long" knows the frustration this avoids.
A useful detail: the character count with spaces is usually what social platforms and form fields measure, while character count without spaces is what some academic style guides mean by "characters." This tool shows both so you never have to wonder which one your limit refers to.
How reading time is worked out
Reading time assumes roughly 200–250 words per minute, the average adult silent-reading pace. It's an estimate meant for planning a blog post or a speech, not a stopwatch guarantee — dense or technical text reads slower.
How to use it
- Type directly into the box, or paste text copied from a document, email, or web page.
- Watch the word, character, sentence, and paragraph counts update live as you edit — there's no button to press.
- Check the character count against your limit; use "with spaces" for social and form fields, "without spaces" if a style guide asks for it.
- Trim or add text right in the box until the numbers land where you need them, then copy your finished draft back out.
FAQ
- How are words counted?
- Words are separated by spaces and line breaks, so hyphenated terms like "well-known" count as one word and numbers like "2025" count as one word.
- Does my text get uploaded anywhere?
- No. Everything runs inside your browser and nothing you type is sent to a server, stored, or seen by us.
- Will it match Microsoft Word's count exactly?
- It's usually within a word or two. Different programs treat things like em dashes, standalone symbols, and trailing spaces slightly differently, so tiny variations are normal.
- Is it free?
- Yes, it's completely free and supported by the ads on the page.