Word & Character Counter
100% private — runs on your device, never uploaded. Works offline once loaded.
Paste or type your text to instantly count words, characters (with and without spaces), sentences, paragraphs and estimated reading time. Everything is counted locally in your browser.
What actually gets counted
The counter splits your text on whitespace to tally words, counts every character both with and without spaces, detects sentence boundaries at periods, question marks and exclamation points, and treats blank-line breaks as paragraph separators. Reading time is derived from the word count using an average adult silent-reading speed of roughly 200 words per minute, so a 1,000-word article comes out to about five minutes.
Where exact numbers matter
Word and character limits show up in more places than people expect. A meta description gets truncated by Google around 155-160 characters, an SMS sent over GSM-7 encoding splits into extra segments past 160 characters, and a tweet on X is capped at 280. Academic assignments often specify a minimum or maximum word count that graders check literally, cover letters are conventionally kept to 250-400 words, and a one-page resume typically holds around 400-600 words depending on font size.
- Meta descriptions: ~155-160 characters before Google truncates
- SMS (GSM-7): 160 characters per segment, fewer if you use emoji
- Resume: roughly 400-600 words fits one page
- Cover letter: 250-400 words is the typical hiring norm
Where the count can surprise you
Sentence counting is naive about abbreviations, so a line like "Dr. Smith met the client at 5 p.m. today" can be read as three sentences instead of one because each period looks like a sentence end. Character-count-without-spaces is the number screenwriters, translators and some billing systems actually bill against, since it strips out the padding that word count alone doesn't account for.
If you paste text copied from a PDF or a scanned document, stray line breaks inside what should be a single paragraph can inflate the paragraph count — worth a quick scan before you trust the figure for a submission.
A practical tip
When you're trying to hit an SEO target length, don't just watch the word count in isolation — check keyword density by eye against total words, since a 2,000-word page with a keyword repeated 40 times reads very differently to search engines than the same keyword used 8 times.
Frequently asked questions
Is my text uploaded?
No — counting happens entirely in your browser and your text is never sent anywhere.
How is reading time calculated?
Based on an average reading speed of about 200 words per minute.
Is my text uploaded anywhere?
No — counting runs entirely in your browser using JavaScript, and the text you paste is never sent to a server or stored.
Does it correctly count sentences with abbreviations like "Dr." or "e.g."?
Not perfectly — the counter looks for sentence-ending punctuation, so abbreviations followed by a period can be miscounted as separate sentences. Treat the sentence count as an estimate rather than an exact figure.
What's the difference between character count with and without spaces?
"With spaces" counts every character including blanks, which is what most character-limited fields (like meta descriptions) measure. "Without spaces" strips whitespace out and is closer to what billing-by-character systems and some translation quotes use.
Does it work with non-English text?
Yes, character counting works for any Unicode text including accented letters and non-Latin scripts, though word counting relies on whitespace between words, so it's less reliable for languages like Chinese or Japanese that don't separate words with spaces.
Does formatting like bold text or links affect the count?
No — only the visible text content is counted; HTML tags, bold or italic styling and link URLs are not included in the totals.
Advertisement