Word Counter

The counter reacts to every keystroke, so there is no button to press and nothing to submit.

1. Type or paste your text into the box. The Paste button reads straight from your clipboard if you prefer it to Ctrl+V.
2. Read the figures under the box: Sentences, Words, Characters, Characters (no spaces), Paragraphs, Lines, Reading time, Speaking time, Letters and Digits.
3. Scroll to Platform and SEO limits. Each bar compares your character count with a cap, turns amber above 90 percent of it and red once you pass it, with the number of characters you are over.
4. Check Most used words to see which words you repeat, then vary them in your edit.
5. Press Copy counts to put the figures on your clipboard, Download text to save what you wrote, or Clear to start again.

The text is processed in your browser and is never uploaded, so drafts, essays and client copy stay on your device.

Every word counter makes small decisions about edge cases, which is why two tools can disagree by a few words. This one treats a word as an unbroken run of letters or digits, which may also contain hyphens and apostrophes. Anything else, including spaces, full stops, commas, slashes and underscores, ends the word.

A sentence ends at a full stop, question mark, exclamation mark or ellipsis that is followed by a space or the end of the text. Text with no closing punctuation still counts as one sentence, and line breaks alone do not end a sentence. A paragraph is a block separated by at least one empty line, while Lines counts every line break, empty ones included.

Worked example: Dr. Smith paid 10,000 for a well-known flat, e.g. in Leeds. gives 13 words, not the 10 you would count by eye, because 10,000 and e.g. each split in two. It also gives 3 sentences, because the full stops after Dr and e.g. look like sentence ends. Adjust by hand when your text is full of numbers or abbreviations.

Reading time divides the word count by 200 and speaking time divides it by 130, each rounded to the nearest whole minute. Any text with at least one word shows at least 1 minute, so a short caption never reads as 0 min.

• 100 words: 1 minute to read, 1 minute to speak
• 300 words: 2 minutes to read, 2 minutes to speak
• 650 words: 3 minutes to read, 5 minutes to speak
• 1,000 words: 5 minutes to read, 8 minutes to speak

Treat these as planning figures. 200 words per minute suits ordinary prose read silently, whereas technical material, tables and unfamiliar vocabulary slow people down. Speaking at 130 words per minute is a measured pace for a talk or voice-over, before pauses for slides or questions. The tool does not time anything you say aloud, so rehearse once with a stopwatch if the slot is tight.

The limit bars count characters, not words, because platform caps are set in characters. They cover an X post (280), Instagram caption (2,200) and bio (150), TikTok caption (2,200), Facebook post (63,206), LinkedIn post (3,000), YouTube title (100) and description (5,000), Google title tag (60), meta description (160), SMS (160) and Pinterest description (500). Platforms change these figures from time to time, so confirm a hard limit on the platform itself. X also applies its own weighting, counting emoji and many East Asian characters double and links at a fixed length, and the bar does not model that.

Word targets come from your brief rather than the platform, so follow the figure you were given. For related checks, the character counter is the better view when the limit is in characters, the sentence counter focuses on sentence length, and the readability score checker shows whether the prose is easy to follow. When you are drafting snippets for search results, the meta tag generator warns about long titles and descriptions, and the free online notepad keeps a longer draft in your browser.