Word counter

Limits you are probably writing against

Almost every piece of writing has a length target, and they come in two flavours: words and characters. Some typical ones:

• Essays and applications. University personal statements, scholarship essays and grant summaries are usually capped in words, often 250, 500 or 650. Going over can mean the text is cut off or rejected outright.
• Search snippets. Page titles are usually trimmed in search results after about 60 characters, and meta descriptions after roughly 150 to 160.
• Text messages. A single SMS holds 160 characters of basic Latin text, but only 70 once it contains a character outside the GSM alphabet, such as an emoji or many accented letters. Longer messages are split and billed as several.
• Social posts and ads. Platforms set their own limits, frequently counting characters rather than words.
• Talks. A five-minute slot holds roughly 750 spoken words; a ten-minute conference talk about 1,500.

Because the counts update with every keystroke, you can trim a draft to a limit sentence by sentence and see the effect immediately.

How the numbers are produced

All seven figures are computed in your browser from the text in the box.

Characters are counted the way you see them, as Unicode grapheme clusters, so a Cyrillic or Greek letter counts as one, just like a Latin one, and so does an emoji or an accented letter. Spaces, tabs and line breaks are included. Characters (no spaces) removes every kind of whitespace, line breaks included, before counting.

Sentences are runs of text ending in a full stop, question mark, exclamation mark or ellipsis. A line break also ends a sentence, so a heading or a list item without punctuation counts as one. Fragments that contain no letters or digits are ignored.

Paragraphs are blocks separated by at least one empty line. Text where each paragraph is on its own line but with no blank line between them counts as a single paragraph.

Reading and speaking time are derived from the word count alone, so a 1,000-word article shows about 4 minutes of reading and close to 7 minutes of speaking.

Why your count may differ from another tool

Word processors, form fields and online counters each make their own choices, and small differences of 1 to 3 percent are normal. These are the cases where the numbers here may surprise you:

• Numbers with punctuation. 3.14 and 1,000 each count as two words, because the dot and comma split the digits. Dates written as 05/10/2026 count as three.
• URLs and email addresses split at every dot and slash, so https://example.com/page counts as four words.
• Languages without spaces. Chinese and Japanese text has no spaces between words, so a whole run of characters counts as one word. Use the character count for these languages instead.
• Abbreviations. e.g., Dr. and etc. end a sentence as far as the counter is concerned, so the sentence count of a technical text runs high.
• Emoji. Many emoji are built from several code points joined together. This tool counts a family emoji, a skin-tone variant or a flag as one character, as does a letter with an accent typed as a separate combining mark, but many sites with a character limit count the code points or even UTF-16 units, so the same emoji can use 2 to 11 of their characters.

If a form enforces a limit, its own counter is the one that matters. Leave a margin of a few words or characters when you are close.

Tips for hitting a target

• When cutting, start with the longest sentences. Splitting or shortening them improves readability as well as length.
• Watch the ratio of characters to words. English prose averages about 5 to 6 characters per word including the space; a much higher figure usually means long, abstract words that could be simpler.
• For a speech, rehearse against the speaking time but plan for pauses; real delivery with slides and audience reaction runs slower than 150 words per minute.
• To change capitalisation before pasting into a strict form, use the case converter, and to compare two versions of a draft side by side, text diff.

The text is never sent anywhere and is not stored, so it is safe to paste unpublished work.