How to count the words in a text
- Type in the box, or paste text from any document, email or web page.
- The counts update as you type: words, characters with and without spaces, sentences, paragraphs, lines and reading time.
- Edit the text until it fits your limit. Clear the box to start again.
How each number is counted
- Words: groups of letters or numbers separated by spaces. Hyphenated words and contractions, like “well-known” or “don’t”, count as one word, as in most word processors. Chinese, Japanese and Thai, written without spaces, are split into words by your browser.
- Characters: every letter, number, symbol, space and line break, counted as you see them. An accented letter or an emoji is one character.
- Characters without spaces: the same count, leaving out spaces, tabs and line breaks.
- Sentences: detected from punctuation such as periods, question marks and exclamation marks. An abbreviation like “etc.” can occasionally be taken as the end of a sentence.
- Paragraphs: every line that contains text. Blank lines are not counted.
- Lines: every line of the text, including blank ones.
How reading time is estimated
Reading time assumes 238 words per minute, the average silent reading speed of adults found by psychologist Marc Brysbaert in a 2019 review of 190 studies. Real speed depends on the reader and on how difficult the text is, so take it as an estimate.
Common length limits
- Page title for search engines: about 50 to 60 characters before it gets cut off.
- Meta description: about 150 to 160 characters.
- Post on X: 280 characters on standard accounts.
- SMS: 160 characters, or 70 if the message uses characters outside the basic SMS alphabet, such as emoji.
- Instagram caption: 2,200 characters.
Your text stays on your device
Counting happens in your browser as you type. Your text is not sent to our servers and is not saved: when you close or refresh the page, it’s gone.
Frequently asked questions
Are spaces counted as characters?
In “Characters”, yes: spaces and line breaks are included. “Characters without spaces” leaves them out. Use whichever one your limit asks for.
Why is my count different from Word or Google Docs?
Word processors differ in small details, such as dashes surrounded by spaces, footnotes or text boxes. For ordinary text the difference is usually zero or a handful of words.
Why does a website say my text is longer?
Some platforms count characters their own way. X, for example, counts every emoji and every Chinese or Japanese character as two, and some forms count a line break as two characters. This counter shows characters as you see them.
Is my text saved or shared?
No. Everything happens in your browser: nothing is sent to our servers or kept after you close the page. Copy your text before leaving if you still need it.
Does it work in other languages?
Yes. It counts any language that separates words with spaces, including accented letters and alphabets like Cyrillic, Greek, Arabic or Devanagari. Chinese, Japanese and Thai are split into words with your browser’s language rules.