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Word & Character Counter
Paste or type your text below for a live word count, character count, sentence count and estimated reading time — useful for essays, tweets, meta descriptions and anything else with a limit.
Counts
Extra detail
Common limits to check against
X / Twitter post: 280 characters
Google meta description: ~155–160 characters
Google title tag: ~60 characters
Typical essay paragraph: 100–200 words
Standard cover letter: 250–400 words
LinkedIn post: ~3,000 character limit
Worked example
Input: "Word games reward players who notice patterns fast. A five-letter Wordle grid, a Boggle board, or a Scrabble rack are all the same puzzle underneath: which arrangement of these letters is a real word?"
Result: 34 words, 200 characters (167 without spaces), 2 sentences, 1 paragraph, average word length 4.8, reading time 9 sec. The longest word it finds is "five-letter" — the counter treats a hyphenated word as one token, the same way a word processor would, rather than splitting it into two.
Frequently asked questions
- How is reading time calculated?
- Using an average adult silent reading speed of about 225 words per minute. Speaking time uses roughly 130 words per minute, closer to a natural spoken pace.
- Does this count hyphenated words as one word or two?
- Hyphenated words (like "well-known") count as a single word, matching how most word processors count them.
- Is my text saved anywhere?
- No. Every count updates from the text already sitting in your browser tab, recalculated on each keystroke — there's no save button because there's nothing to save it to.
