Word Counter

How to use Word Counter

1. Paste your text into the input area — everything below updates instantly.
2. Check the live counters: words, characters (with and without spaces), sentences, paragraphs, and estimated reading time.
3. Use the 'reading time' figure to gauge whether your piece fits a target length (blog post, essay, tweet thread).
4. Copy your text back out or edit in place — the counters keep pace with every keystroke.

Common use cases

• Academic essays. Hit an exact 500-word or 1,500-word requirement without guesswork. Common assignment ranges (500, 750, 1,000, 1,500, 2,500) are all doable in seconds.
• Social media. Twitter/X caps at 280 characters, LinkedIn posts perform best under 1,300, Instagram captions under 2,200. The character counter respects all Unicode — emojis and accented letters count correctly.
• SEO meta descriptions. Google truncates meta descriptions around 155–160 characters. Trim your text until the character counter (with spaces) fits.
• Speech and presentation prep. The reading-time estimate is calibrated to 200 words per minute — a comfortable pace for narration or reading a speech aloud.

Tips

• The counter treats consecutive whitespace as a single separator, so double-spaces and stray tabs don't inflate the word count.
• Sentence count uses full stops, question marks, and exclamation marks — abbreviations like 'Dr.' can occasionally cause overcounts on rare text.
• Reading time is a rough guide. Technical writing is typically slower (~130 wpm), while familiar fiction skims faster (~250 wpm).

Troubleshooting

The character count is higher than I expect.

Non-breaking spaces (common when pasting from Word) and invisible Unicode characters count as characters. Try 'strip whitespace' in the case-converter tool to see if hidden characters are inflating the count.

Emojis are being counted strangely.

Some emojis are composed of multiple Unicode code points (family emojis, skin-tone modifiers). We count characters via `Array.from(text)` which respects code-point grouping.