Character & Word Counter
0Characters
0Without spaces
0Words
0Sentences
0Paragraphs
0Lines
0 secReading time
Counting against a limit
Almost every writing task has a ceiling somewhere: a meta description that gets cut at about 160 characters, a bio field that stops at 150, an essay with a word count attached to the grade, a bid or grant application with a hard limit that rejects rather than truncates. This counter reports characters with and without spaces, words, sentences, paragraphs, lines and an estimated reading time, all updating as you type.
Nothing leaves your browser. The text is never uploaded, which matters when what you are counting is a draft, a client document or anything under an NDA.
How each figure is counted
Characters are counted as graphemes — what a reader would call a character — rather than as UTF-16 code units. The difference is not academic: a family emoji is eleven UTF-16 units and seven Unicode code points, but one character, and a naive count would charge you eleven against a 280-character limit. Accented letters like é count as one whether they are stored as one code point or as a letter plus a combining mark.
Words are runs of non-whitespace, so "state-of-the-art" is one word and an em dash with spaces around it is not. Sentences are runs of text ending in a full stop, question mark or exclamation mark. Paragraphs are blocks separated by at least one blank line. Lines are counted by line breaks, so a single wrapped paragraph is one line however wide the box is.
Reading time
Reading time assumes 200 words per minute, which is a reasonable average for adult silent reading of ordinary prose. So 500 words is shown as 2 min 30 sec and 1,000 words as 5 min.
Treat it as a rough guide rather than a measurement. Silent reading rates for adults vary widely — roughly 175 to 300 words per minute is a common range for everyday material — and dense technical writing, tables, code or an unfamiliar language all slow it down considerably. Reading aloud is much slower, closer to 130 to 150 words a minute, so a script should be timed at well over the figure shown here.
Where a count may differ from another tool
Different tools genuinely disagree, because the definitions are conventions rather than standards. Word processors often count a hyphenated compound as two words, treat a numeral differently, or include or exclude footnotes and headers. A count taken here and a count taken in a word processor can differ by a few per cent on the same text without either being broken.
Two specific cases to know about: an abbreviation like "e.g." adds to the sentence count, because the counter cannot tell a full stop inside an abbreviation from one at the end of a sentence; and trailing whitespace is trimmed before words and sentences are counted, but is included in the raw character count. Where a limit is enforced by a specific platform, the platform’s own counter is the one that decides.
Counting questions
Should I count characters with or without spaces?
It depends who is asking. Social platforms, meta descriptions and SMS all count spaces. Translation and copywriting are frequently priced per thousand characters without spaces. Both figures are shown so you do not have to guess which convention applies.
How many characters is a page?
A double-spaced page in 12-point type is conventionally about 250 words, or roughly 1,500 characters including spaces. Single-spaced it is nearer 500 words. These are publishing rules of thumb, not measurements — the real answer depends on the typeface, margins and leading.
Why does an emoji count as one character here and more elsewhere?
Because this counter counts graphemes and many systems count UTF-16 code units. A composed emoji such as a family or a flag is a single visible character built from several code points joined together. Which count applies to you depends on the platform enforcing the limit.