Word & Character Counter

What is a word counter?

A word counter is a tool that tells you, in real time, how long a piece of text is — in words, characters, sentences, paragraphs and estimated reading time. Instead of guessing or copying your text into a document just to check the count, you paste it once and every number updates as you type.

That matters more often than you'd think. Tweets, meta descriptions, essays, ad copy, subtitles and application forms all come with limits — and writing to a limit is far easier when the count is right in front of you.

How to use it

1. Type or paste your text into the box above.
2. Watch the live counts update: words, characters, characters without spaces, sentences and paragraphs.
3. Check the reading time estimate to see how long your text takes to read aloud or silently.
4. Use Copy to grab your text, or Clear to start fresh.

Everything runs locally, so it stays fast even with long documents and works the same offline once the page has loaded.

Why character and word limits matter

Different platforms care about different counts, so it helps to know which one you're writing to:

• Characters are what most strict limits use — Twitter/X posts, SMS messages, and form fields.
• Words are the unit for essays, articles and most academic or professional briefs.
• Characters without spaces is the count some publishers and translators bill or budget by.
• Reading time is what content teams use to label articles ("5 min read") and to keep videos or talks on schedule.

For SEO specifically, two limits come up constantly: page titles read best at roughly 50–60 characters, and meta descriptions at around 150–160 characters before search engines truncate them. A counter makes hitting those windows effortless.

Tips for writing to a count

• Write first, trim second. Get your ideas down, then use the live count to cut toward your target instead of stopping every sentence to check.
• Mind the spaces. If a field counts characters, remember spaces and line breaks usually count too — the "no spaces" number shows you the difference.
• Use reading time as a sanity check. If an "email" is suddenly a six-minute read, it probably wants to be shorter or become a document — and the Readability Checker tells you whether the words themselves are easy to get through.
• Pair it with editing. Once the length is right, run the text through our Case Converter to fix capitalisation in a click.

Accurate, private, and always free

Because the word counter processes everything on your own device, there are no uploads, no accounts and no limits on how much you can paste. Keep it open in a tab whenever you're writing to a length — it turns "is this too long?" into a number you can actually see.