Character and Word Counter
Paste or type your text — characters, words, sentences, paragraphs and estimated reading time are counted automatically as you type.
How to use the character and word counter
- Type or paste your text into the field.
- Characters, words, sentences, paragraphs and reading time update automatically as you type — nothing is stored or sent anywhere.
What exactly gets counted?
Characters with spaces counts absolutely every character, including spaces and line breaks — this is often the number platforms with a character limit (like X/Twitter or SMS) actually use. Characters without spaces only counts the visible characters.
Sentences are counted by looking for periods, exclamation marks and question marks — a simple approach that works well for normal text, but can misfire slightly on abbreviations (e.g. "approx. 5") or unusual punctuation.
Estimated reading time is based on an average reading speed of 200 words per minute — a commonly used estimate, but actual reading time varies with the text's difficulty and the reader's pace.
Characters, words and bytes are three different numbers
A character is not always one byte. Accented and non-Latin letters take two or more bytes in UTF-8, and emoji take four or more — some composite emoji, such as families or flags, consist of several code points that together can exceed twenty bytes even though they display as a single symbol. Where a limit is given in bytes rather than characters, a seemingly short text can therefore blow past it.
This shows up in practice in fields with hard limits. An SMS holds 160 characters using the standard Latin alphabet, but only 70 as soon as the message contains a single character outside it. Database fields, meta descriptions and APIs may similarly count either characters or bytes, and the difference is worth checking before writing right up to the limit.
Frequently asked questions
Do you store the text I type?
No. Counting happens entirely in your own browser — the text is never sent to any server and isn't stored anywhere.
Why isn't the sentence count perfect?
The sentence count uses a simple rule (period/exclamation mark/question mark) that doesn't distinguish between the end of a sentence and, for example, an abbreviation with a period. For most texts it still gives a good estimate.
How is reading time calculated?
Number of words divided by 200 (average reading speed for adults, given in words per minute). This is a general estimate — a technical text is often read more slowly, an easy-to-read text more quickly.