Free Word Counter
Live counts for words, characters, sentences, paragraphs and reading time.
Word counts decide more than people expect: essay limits, meta descriptions, ad headlines, journal submissions and translation quotes are all measured in words or characters. This counter updates as you type and reports six figures at once, plus the words you lean on most often. Nothing is uploaded — the text never leaves the tab it is typed into.
| Word | Count | Share |
|---|---|---|
| Nothing counted yet. | ||
How it works
Paste or type
Counts update on every keystroke, with no button to press.
Read the six figures
Words, characters with and without spaces, sentences, paragraphs and reading time.
Check your repetition
The frequency table shows which words you are relying on most.
Why two word counters disagree about the same text
There is no single definition of a word, so every counter draws the line somewhere. This one splits on whitespace, which is the same rule Microsoft Word uses — so "state-of-the-art" counts as one word, an em dash surrounded by spaces counts as one, and a URL counts as one however long it is. A counter that splits on punctuation instead would report four, zero and several for the same input.
The gap widens with languages that do not put spaces between words. Chinese, Japanese and Thai text has no whitespace to split on, so a whitespace counter reports a handful of words for a full page. Character counts are the meaningful measure there, which is why this tool reports characters both with and without spaces rather than treating the word count as the headline number.
Characters have their own trap. JavaScript stores text as UTF-16, and characters outside the Basic Multilingual Plane — most emoji, some rarer CJK characters, several historic scripts — occupy two units each. A tool reading the raw length reports 2 for a single emoji. This counter iterates by code point instead, so one emoji counts as one character. Your database may still disagree, because a UTF-8 column counts bytes: that same emoji occupies four.
The character limits that actually matter
A page title is truncated by Google at roughly 580 pixels, which works out to about 60 characters in practice — wide capitals eat the budget faster than narrow lowercase. Meta descriptions get cut around 155 to 160 characters on desktop and closer to 120 on mobile, so the sentence that must survive belongs first.
Elsewhere the limits are hard rather than cosmetic. A single SMS holds 160 characters in GSM-7 encoding but only 70 once any character forces a switch to UCS-2 — one curly apostrophe or emoji is enough to trigger it. Google Ads headlines cap at 30 characters and descriptions at 90. Twitter/X counts 280, but URLs count as a fixed 23 regardless of their real length.
Reading time here uses 225 words per minute, a common average for adults reading prose on screen. Treat it as a rough figure: technical writing with code examples reads far slower, and a scannable listicle far faster. Estimates published by other sites vary between 200 and 265 words per minute, which is why two blogs can label the same article a 4-minute and a 5-minute read.