Word & character counter

How to use it

1. Type or paste your text into the box — the counts update on every keystroke.
2. Characters are shown both with and without spaces, since forms differ on which they mean.
3. Reading time assumes an average of 200 words per minute.

Why two tools can disagree about the same text

Word counts are not standardised. This counter splits on whitespace, which is what Microsoft Word and Google Docs effectively do, so a hyphenated compound like “state-of-the-art” counts as one word. Some academic tools split on hyphens and would call it four. If you are writing to a limit that someone else will check, it is worth pasting your text into whichever tool they will use before you trust a number that sits close to the line.

Character counts diverge for a different reason: what counts as one character. An emoji such as 👨‍👩‍👧 is a single thing on screen but several underlying code points joined together, and a form that counts the raw code units can reject text that looks well within its limit. The same applies to accented letters written as a base letter plus a combining mark. This tool counts what you see, one grapheme at a time.

The limits people are usually writing to

A meta description is truncated by Google at roughly 155–160 characters, though the real cut-off is pixel width, not character count. A post on X allows 280 characters. UCAS personal statements are capped at 4,000 characters including spaces, and university essays are usually specified in words with a ±10% tolerance. Those cases are exactly why the counter shows characters both with and without spaces — the two figures can differ by a sixth, and the form rarely tells you which one it means.

Reading time is the softest number here. Two hundred words per minute is a fair average for adult prose in English, but dense technical writing is read closer to 100–150, and skim-reading runs far higher. Treat it as an order-of-magnitude estimate for a blog byline, not as a measurement.

Questions