Word Counter
Live word, character, sentence and paragraph counts — plus reading time and case conversion.
- Free
- No sign-up
- Runs in your browser
0 words · 0 characters
Your text never leaves this device — the draft is kept in this browser only.
Length limits
X counts every link as 23 and emoji or Chinese/Japanese characters as 2. One SMS holds 160 plain characters, or 70 once the text has Hindi, emoji or curly quotes; longer messages are split into parts of 153 (or 67).
How words and characters are counted
The counter splits your text with the browser’s built-in language rules (Intl.Segmenter), the same rules used to move the cursor word by word. A word is any run of letters or numbers, so punctuation and emoji don’t count as words, “didn’t” is one word, and hyphenated compounds like “well-known” count once, as in Word and Google Docs. Characters are counted as you see them, so an emoji with a skin tone counts as one.
For example, “It was a well-known fact. Dr. Rao didn’t mind!” has 9 words, 46 characters (38 without spaces) and 2 sentences — the full stop after “Dr” doesn’t end a sentence. Hindi and other Indian languages work the same way: “मेरा नाम राम है। मैं दिल्ली में रहता हूँ।” is 9 words and 2 sentences, with the danda (।) ending each one.
How long does it take to read 1,000 words?
About 4 minutes 12 seconds. Reading time uses 238 words per minute, the average silent-reading speed for adults reading non-fiction; speaking time uses 140 words per minute, a comfortable pace for a talk or video script, so 1,000 words takes about 7 minutes 9 seconds to say out loud. Slides, pauses and questions add more.
Character limits worth knowing
A post on X allows 280 characters, but links always count as 23 and emoji as 2 — the pill above uses the same rules. Search results usually show around 150–160 characters of a meta description before cutting it off. Instagram captions stop at 2,200 characters. An SMS holds 160 basic characters, but one Hindi letter, emoji or curly apostrophe switches the whole message to Unicode, which fits only 70.
Frequently asked questions
- Is my text uploaded or stored anywhere?
- No. Everything is counted in your browser. Your draft is saved only in this browser’s local storage so it survives a refresh; press Clear to remove it.
- How are paragraphs and lines counted?
- Every line that has text on it counts as a paragraph, and blank lines are ignored. Lines counts every line, including empty ones.
- Why is the X (Twitter) count different from the character count?
- X weights some characters: links count as 23 whatever their length, and emoji, Chinese, Japanese and Korean characters count as 2. Latin and Indian scripts count as 1.
- Can I undo a case change?
- Yes. Undo steps back through your last 20 case changes, clean-ups and clears. Ordinary typing can be undone with Ctrl+Z (⌘Z on a Mac) as usual.