Count words and characters

How to use it#

1. Paste or type your text into the box.
2. Read the word and character counts under the box as they update. Sentences, paragraphs, lines, and how long the text takes to read or say aloud are listed with the settings.
3. Under the counts, the keyword list shows which words turn up most often and what share of the text each takes. Switch to two or three words to find repeated phrases, and untick the box to count words like "the" and "and" too.
4. Clear it when you are done.

Which count actually applies to you#

Character limits usually come from software: a meta description truncates around 160 characters, a post on X caps at 280, a LinkedIn post at 3,000, an Instagram caption at 2,200, and an SMS segment at 160. These count every space, so the with-spaces figure is the one to watch.

Word limits usually come from people: essays, applications, abstracts. Graders and editors mean whitespace-separated words, which is what this counts. If a piece has both kinds of limit, aim to come in under whichever is tighter.

How reading and speaking time are worked out#

Reading time here is words divided by 200 and rounded up, which is the middle of the commonly cited 200 to 250 words per minute range for adult silent reading of ordinary prose.

Treat it as a rough signal. Dense technical writing runs slower and a familiar narrative faster, and someone skimming for a single fact is not really reading at all. It will tell you whether this is a two-minute post or a ten-minute one.

Speaking time uses 130 words per minute, a steady pace for a prepared talk, and is given to the second because a speech usually has a hard limit. Nerves speed most people up, while pauses for slides and questions slow them down, so rehearse once with a timer and compare. If you run well under the estimate, you are probably rushing.

Reading the keyword density list#

Keyword density is how often a word or phrase appears, as a share of all the words in the text. A word used 6 times in 300 words has a density of 2%. For a phrase, the share counts every word it covers, so a two-word phrase used 6 times in 300 words is 4%.

The list starts with common English words such as "the", "and", and "of" left out, because they top every English text and say nothing about its subject. The percentages still divide by every word, so ticking the box changes which rows you see, not their figures. The list of common words is English only, so in any other language every word is counted.

Words are matched regardless of capitals, and accented letters and other alphabets count like any other letter, so "Café" and "café" are one keyword. An apostrophe inside a word keeps it whole, so "don't" is one word. A hyphen splits one, so "long-tail" counts as "long" and "tail", and the two-word view finds "long tail" either way. Numbers on their own, like a year or a price, are left out because they are rarely what a page is about, while "mp3" and "4k" stay in. That is why the total at the top of the list can be a little lower than the word count above it.

Phrases do not run across punctuation, so "red apple" is not found in "red, apple". A phrase appears in the list once it has been used twice, since nearly every run of words appears once and a list of those would tell you nothing.

Why the counts can differ from Word#

Word processors each make their own decisions. Some count a hyphenated compound as one word, some as two; some include footnotes and headings, some do not. Two tools disagreeing by a percent or so on a long document is normal.

This counter uses the simple, predictable rule: a word is a run of characters separated by whitespace. An emoji or an accented letter counts as one character, as you would count it, even where it is stored as several pieces: a flag is two codes joined together, and a thumbs up with a skin tone is two as well.

Chinese and Japanese do not put spaces between words, so an unbroken run of either counts as one word here. Use the character count for them, which is how limits in those languages are usually set.