Word and Character Counter
Live counts for words, characters, sentences and reading time.
Runs entirely in your browser
Loading the tool…
- 0Words
- 0Characters
- 0No spaces
- 0Sentences
- 0Paragraphs
- 0sReading time
Detail
| Unique words | 0 |
|---|---|
| Lines | 0 |
| Longest word | — |
| Average word length | 0 |
| Average sentence | 0 words |
| Speaking time | 0s |
| Flesch reading ease | — |
| Grade level | — |
Counts update on every keystroke: characters with and without spaces, words, sentences, paragraphs and lines. Useful when a form has a hard character cap, or an assignment has a word floor.
Reading time assumes 238 words per minute, the median for silent reading of English prose (Brysbaert, 2019), and speaking time assumes a 150 wpm presentation pace. The Flesch Reading Ease and Flesch-Kincaid grade scores estimate how hard the text is: aim for 60-70 and grade 8 or below for general audiences.
How to use it
- Type or paste your text into the box.
- Watch the counts update live. There is no button to press.
- Check the readability scores if you are writing for a general audience.
Questions
How is a word counted?
Any run of characters separated by whitespace, after stripping surrounding punctuation. Hyphenated compounds like 'well-known' count as one word, which matches Word and Google Docs.
What counts as a sentence?
A run of text ending in . ! ? or …, plus any trailing text with no terminator. Abbreviations like 'e.g.' can inflate the count slightly, a limitation every counter shares.
What is a good Flesch Reading Ease score?
Above 60 is comfortable for most adults; 30 or below reads like an academic paper. Shorter sentences move this score more than shorter words do.
How many pages is 1000 words?
About four double-spaced pages, or two single-spaced, in 12pt Times New Roman with one-inch margins. Change the font and it moves: the same text in Arial runs longer, and in a narrower column longer still. If a brief specifies pages, ask what it means in words, because that is the number both of you can actually check.
How long does it take to read 1000 words?
Roughly four minutes silently and closer to seven aloud. Those are medians for adults reading English prose; a technical passage read carefully can take twice as long, and skimming for one fact takes a fraction. Use it to size an article, not to promise anyone a duration.
Should I count characters with or without spaces?
Check which the form means, because they differ by roughly a sixth. Almost every online field, and every SMS gateway, counts spaces. Some publishing and translation rates are quoted per thousand characters without them. Both figures are shown so you never have to guess twice.
Why is my count different from Word or Google Docs?
Small differences are normal and come from edge cases: how each tool treats hyphenated compounds, numbers, footnote markers and text inside tables. This page treats any run of characters between whitespace as a word after stripping surrounding punctuation, which is what Word does. Differences of a percent or two only matter when you are sitting on a hard limit.
How long is that, in minutes?
| Words | Read silently | Read aloud |
|---|---|---|
| 100 | 25 seconds | 40 seconds |
| 250 | 1 minute | 1 minute 40 |
| 500 | 2 minutes 6 | 3 minutes 20 |
| 750 | 3 minutes 9 | 5 minutes |
| 1000 | 4 minutes 12 | 6 minutes 40 |
| 2000 | 8 minutes 24 | 13 minutes 20 |
| 5000 | 21 minutes | 33 minutes 20 |
Silent reading is at 238 words per minute, the median Brysbaert found across several hundred studies in 2019. Reading aloud is slower, and a presentation slower still, which is why the second column uses 150. If you are writing a talk, the second column is the honest one, and it is usually a shock.
The limits worth checking against
| Where | Limit |
|---|---|
| Page title in search results | About 60 characters before truncation |
| Meta description | About 155 characters |
| One SMS | 160 characters, or 70 if any character forces the wider encoding |
| A post on X | 280 characters |
| Instagram caption | 2200 characters |
| LinkedIn post | 3000 characters |
| YouTube title | 100 characters |
| Email subject line | About 60 before phones cut it off |
The SMS rule catches people out. A message is 160 characters while it stays inside the basic GSM alphabet, but one emoji, one curly quote or one accented letter switches the whole message to a wider encoding and the limit drops to 70. That is how a short message turns into three billed segments.
Your data stays on your device
Everything above runs inside your browser as WebAssembly compiled from Rust. Nothing you type is uploaded, logged or stored on a server. You can load this page once, go offline, and it still works.
This page makes no requests at all, to anywhere. That is not a promise in the copy: it is a Content-Security-Policy header your browser enforces, and connect-src on it is none. Open the network tab and watch nothing happen.