Word and Character Counter

How to count words and characters

Type or paste your text into the box. The counts update instantly. It is useful for essays and assignments with word limits, social media posts and meta descriptions with character limits, and checking how long a speech will take.

How things are counted

Words

Runs of letters or numbers. Apostrophes and hyphens inside a word keep it together, so “don’t” and “well-known” each count as one word. Numbers such as “3.14” and “1,000” are one word. Punctuation and symbols on their own, like “—” or “&”, are not words.

Characters

Every character you can see, plus spaces and line breaks. Accented letters and emoji count as one character each, even when they are stored as several code units (for example “é” or “👍🏽”).

Characters without spaces

As above, but excluding spaces, tabs and line breaks.

Sentences

Text ending with ., !, ? or … followed by a space or the end of the text. A final sentence without punctuation still counts. Abbreviations like “Dr.” are counted as sentence endings.

Paragraphs

Blocks of text separated by one or more blank lines.

Lines

Every line, including empty ones, as an editor would show them. Empty text has no lines.

Reading and speaking time

Estimated at 238 words per minute for silent reading (an average for adults reading non-fiction) and140 words per minute for speaking aloud at a presentation pace.

Limitations

• Languages written without spaces between words, such as Chinese, Japanese and Thai, are counted as one word per run of text, so the word count will be low. Character counts are accurate.
• Very long texts (several hundred thousand words) are counted after a short pause in typing to keep things smooth.