Word Counter & Character Counter

What the word counter measures

Six numbers update as you type. Words are chunks of text separated by whitespace. Characters counts every character including spaces and line breaks, and characters without spaces drops all whitespace.Sentences are runs of text ending in a full stop, question mark, exclamation mark or ellipsis, paragraphs are blocks separated by a blank line, and lines counts line breaks. Reading and speaking time use 238 and 150 words per minute — the same figures as ourreading time calculator, which explains where they come from.

How to use it

1. Paste your text into the box, or type directly. The counters update on every keystroke; there is no button to press.
2. Check the figure that matches your requirement — words for an essay or article, characters for a post, headline or description.
3. Pick a platform preset or enter your own limit. The bar shows how much room is left and turns red when you go over.
4. Look at the keyword table: if one word takes a large share of a short text, vary your wording.
5. Use Copy stats to paste the numbers into a brief, a ticket or an editor's note.

Word count or character count: which one matters?

Word count is the standard for essays, articles, scripts and submissions — "800 words" means roughly the same thing in any editor. Character count matters wherever the container is fixed: social posts, SMS, ad copy, page titles and descriptions, form fields and database columns. Some briefs quote characters without spaces, which is why both numbers are shown side by side. When a requirement is ambiguous, ask which one it means before you trim anything.

Common character limits

Platforms change these numbers without much notice, so treat the table as a starting point and confirm the current limit in the platform itself. The presets above the keyword table use the same figures.

How words are counted

The rule is deliberately simple: split at whitespace, count the pieces. A hyphenated compound, a URL, a number and an email address each count as one word. A standalone symbol such as "&" or "—" also counts as one. That matches how most editors report a count, but word processors differ in the edge cases, so a 1% gap with Word or Google Docs is normal. If a submission has a strict cap, leave yourself a margin rather than writing to the exact number.

Keyword repetition, not keyword density

The table lists your ten most used words after removing common filler words, with a count and each word's share of the remaining words. It is a repetition detector, not a target: there is no density a page must reach to rank, and chasing one tends to produce stiff writing. Use it to catch a word you leaned on too hard, or to confirm that the topic word your reader came for actually appears.

Chinese, Japanese and Korean text

These languages do not put spaces between words, so a whitespace counter undercounts them badly. This page uses your browser's built-in word segmentation when it is available to give an approximate word count, and the character count — which is exact — is the number to rely on. The tool also exists in Japanese, Korean, Chinese, German, French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Dutch, Polish and Turkish, with byte counts and manuscript-page conversion where people use them.

Privacy

Everything happens in your browser. There is no upload, no account, no logging of your text and nothing stored after you close the tab, so confidential drafts are safe to paste.

From counting to reading

If the text you are counting came from research, the harder problem is usually finding it again. Marqly saves pages and articles to one library, summarizes them with AI and lets you search by meaning — see the second-brain guide and theweb highlighter. For the time side of the same text, thereading time calculator has a table of how long common word counts take to read, and theHTML to Markdown converter cleans a web page into plain text you can paste here.