Free online tool
Word & Character Counter
Paste your text below to see the word count, character count, and reading time update in real time.
What is a word counter?
A word counter is a simple tool that analyzes a block of text and reports how many words, characters, sentences and paragraphs it contains. Whether you're a student trying to hit an essay minimum, a copywriter working to a client brief, or a novelist tracking daily output, being able to see your counts update in real time saves you from constantly checking your word processor.
How to use this tool
Paste or type your text into the box above. Every count refreshes instantly — no button to press, nothing to upload. The reading time estimate assumes a comfortable pace of about 200 words per minute, which is roughly the average for adult readers. Everything stays in your browser, so you can safely paste even sensitive drafts.
When word counts matter
Academic essays, journalism pitches, meta descriptions, tweets, LinkedIn posts, and book proposals all come with word or character limits. Even when there's no hard limit, keeping an eye on length helps you stay concise: shorter tends to be sharper, and readers reward clarity.
+Is my text saved anywhere?
No. All counting happens locally in your browser. The text is never sent to a server.
+How is a sentence counted?
We split on periods, exclamation marks and question marks followed by whitespace or the end of the text.
+Does it work on mobile?
Yes — the tool is fully responsive and works in any modern mobile browser.
Getting the numbers right before you hit publish
A meta description that clocks in at 172 characters gets truncated in Google's results at roughly 155-160, and a tweet's 280-character limit counts emoji as two characters each, so eyeballing length in a text editor rarely tells you the truth. This counter breaks a draft down into words, characters with and without spaces, sentences, and paragraphs so you can hit a hard limit instead of guessing at it.
Writers who work across multiple platforms in a single day — a blog post in the morning, ad copy in the afternoon, product descriptions in the evening — end up juggling a different length rule for each one. Having a single place to paste a draft and instantly see every relevant number removes the mental math and the second-guessing that comes with switching contexts constantly.
Where writers actually use the sentence count
Sentence counting relies on terminal punctuation, so an abbreviation like 'e.g.' or a decimal like '3.5' can occasionally split into an extra sentence — worth a manual glance if your count looks unusually high for a short paragraph.
Academic and journalistic style guides often cap average sentence length around 20 words for readability; dividing the word count by the sentence count here gives you that figure without opening a separate readability tool.
Screenwriters and scriptwriters use a rough rule of one page of properly formatted script per minute of screen time, which usually works out to around 150-170 words per page — tracking word count against page estimates during a first draft keeps a script from running long before it ever reaches a table read.
Character limits that matter in practice
LinkedIn cuts post previews around 210 characters before the 'see more' link, Google title tags render comfortably up to about 60 characters, and SMS gateways split messages after 160 characters of GSM-7 text or 70 for Unicode. Checking the character-count-without-spaces figure is the more honest number when a platform's limit is defined in bytes rather than visual width.
Product listings on marketplaces like Amazon or Etsy often impose separate limits on titles, bullet points, and descriptions, and exceeding any one of them silently truncates the listing rather than throwing an error — pasting each section through a counter before submission catches this before a listing goes live looking cut off.
Word count targets for common content types
Cover letters read best between 250 and 400 words, a length long enough to make a case but short enough that a hiring manager actually finishes it. Press releases traditionally run 400-500 words, and academic abstracts are almost always capped by the publisher at a fixed count like 150 or 250 words, which makes precision far more important than in casual writing.
Long-form blog content aimed at competitive search terms frequently runs 1,500-2,500 words not because length itself ranks pages, but because covering a topic thoroughly tends to require that much space — tracking count during drafting helps a writer notice when a post has drifted short of covering the topic or long past the point of staying focused.
A habit worth building
Paste your draft in before formatting rather than after — extra line breaks and bullet markers inflate paragraph counts and can throw off a per-paragraph word average you might be using to judge pacing.
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