Word & Character Counter

What is the word & character counter?

A word and character counter analyses a block of text and reports live statistics: how many words, characters (with and without spaces), sentences and paragraphs it contains, plus an estimated reading time. Writers, students and marketers use it to hit length targets — an essay word count, a meta description character limit, or a tweet-sized snippet — without manual counting.

How it works

Words are counted by splitting the text on any run of whitespace and ignoring empty fragments, so multiple spaces or line breaks don't inflate the total. Characters are counted two ways: the raw length, and the length with spaces removed. Sentences are estimated by counting terminal punctuation (periods, question marks and exclamation marks), and paragraphs by counting blocks separated by blank lines. Reading time assumes an average silent reading speed of about 200 words per minute.

Worked example

Paste a 500-word article and the counter instantly shows 500 words, perhaps around 2,900 characters, roughly 30 sentences and an estimated reading time of about 2 minutes 30 seconds. Trim a paragraph and every number updates the moment you edit — useful when you must land just under a strict limit such as a 160-character meta description.