Word Counter

What this tool does

Word Counter analyses any text as you type. It reports words, characters with and without spaces, sentences, paragraphs and lines, estimates reading and speaking time, lists your most frequent keywords and shows how close you are to common platform limits.

Word limits are everywhere: university essays, job applications, meta descriptions, ad copy and social posts all have a maximum length, and going over usually means your text is cut off or rejected. Counting by hand is slow and unreliable, and the counter built into a word processor is not always at hand when you are writing in a browser form or an email.

This counter uses the Unicode-aware Intl.Segmenter API built into modern browsers, so it counts words correctly in languages that do not separate words with spaces, such as Chinese, Japanese and Thai, and treats an emoji as a single character rather than two. Nothing is uploaded: the analysis happens on your device, which makes it safe for unpublished articles, legal drafts and confidential reports.

How to use Word Counter

1. Type or paste your text into the box, or drop a .txt or .md file onto it.
2. Read the live totals for words, characters, sentences, paragraphs and lines below the editor.
3. Check the reading-time estimate; change the reading speed in Options if your audience reads faster or slower than the 238 words-per-minute average.
4. Review the Top keywords table to spot words you repeat too often. Turn off “Ignore common words” to include words like “the” and “and”.
5. Use the Platform limits bars to confirm your text fits an X post, meta description, Instagram caption, LinkedIn post or SMS.
6. Open History to restore something you were working on earlier in this browser.

Tips for better results

• For SEO meta descriptions, aim for 120–160 characters so the snippet is informative but not truncated on most screens.
• Speaking time assumes about 130 words per minute, a comfortable pace for presentations and video scripts.
• If a form counts characters differently, check whether it counts spaces and line breaks; compare with the “no spaces” figure.
• Keyword density above 2–3% for a single term often reads as repetitive. Use synonyms to vary your wording.

Common use cases

• Keeping a college application essay within a 650-word limit.
• Fitting a product description into a marketplace’s character limit.
• Estimating how long a speech or YouTube script will take to deliver.
• Checking a translated text is roughly the same length as the original.
• Spotting overused words while editing a blog post.

Common mistakes to avoid

• Assuming every platform counts the same way: some count URLs or emoji differently, so leave a small margin.
• Pasting formatted text with hidden characters. If counts look wrong, run it through the Invisible Character Detector first.
• Relying on reading time for technical documents; dense material is read far more slowly than the average.
• Treating keyword density as a ranking formula. Search engines reward helpful, natural writing, not a target percentage.