Word count calculator

How does this word counter count words?

A word is any run of characters between spaces, tabs or line breaks. That is the rule Microsoft Word and most editors use, so a number such as 3.14, a hyphenated word such as well-known and a lone dash each count as one word if spaces surround them. The count updates the moment you change the text.

What is the difference between characters with and without spaces?

Characters with spaces count every letter, digit, punctuation mark and space, but not the line breaks between paragraphs. Characters without spaces leave out all spaces, tabs and line breaks. Limits for headlines, ads and many forms are written in characters with spaces, so use that figure unless the form says otherwise.

How many characters can a post on X hold?

280. X counts with a weighted system: Latin letters, digits and punctuation weigh 1, while emoji and characters from Chinese, Japanese and Korean weigh 2, so those fill the limit twice as fast. Every web address counts as 23 no matter how long it really is. Choose X post in the target list and the page uses these rules.

How long is one text message?

A single SMS holds 160 characters in the standard GSM-7 alphabet, or 70 if any character is outside it. Longer messages are split into parts that carry a small header, which leaves 153 characters per part in GSM-7 or 67 in UCS-2. One emoji is enough to switch the whole message to the 70-character limit.

How long should a meta description be?

Google says there is no limit on how long a meta description can be; it cuts the snippet to fit the width of the device. Advice that quotes a fixed number of characters is a habit of SEO tools, not a rule published by Google, so write for the reader and put the key point first.

How is this different from the reading time calculator?

The reading time calculator turns a word count, or pasted text, into minutes. This page counts everything in the text you paste (words, characters, sentences, paragraphs) and checks it against a limit; it also shows the reading time for convenience. If all you have is a number of words, the reading time calculator is quicker.

Does the counter store my text?

No. The counting happens in your browser. The page remembers what you typed on this device so you can come back to it, and nothing is sent to a server.

What the numbers mean

Word count measures length the way editors, teachers and publishers do: assignments, commissions and abstracts are all set in words. Character count matters when space is fixed by a form or a network: a headline field, a text message, a post. Sentence and paragraph counts, together with words per sentence, give a rough feel for how dense a text is, though they say nothing about whether it is clear.

How each figure is worked out

Words are runs of non-space characters. Characters with spaces are all visible characters plus spaces, counted as the reader sees them, so an emoji or an accented letter made from two code points is one character. Sentences end at a period, question mark, exclamation mark or ellipsis that is followed by a space or the end of the text, so 3.14 is not split. Paragraphs are the lines that contain text, because pressing Enter starts a new paragraph in every editor. Average sentence length is words divided by sentences. Reading time is words divided by 238 words per minute for silent non-fiction, 260 for fiction and 183 for reading aloud, the averages from Marc Brysbaert's 2019 review of reading studies.

Worked example

Take the opening of Moby-Dick: "Call me Ishmael. Some years ago—never mind how long precisely—having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world." The counter reports 41 words, 224 characters with spaces, 184 without, 2 sentences and 1 paragraph. That is 20.5 words per sentence. At 238 words per minute it takes 0 min 10 s to read silently and 0 min 13 s aloud at 183. Notice the dashes: Melville wrote them without spaces, so "ago—never" and "precisely—having" are each one word to a counter. Put spaces around the dashes and the count rises from 41 to 45. Word processors behave the same way, which is why two tools can disagree by a few words on the same text.

Checking a limit

Pick a target and the result shows how many characters are left. A post such as "Big news: our new guide is live!", a long web address and a party-popper emoji counts as 59 on X, although it contains far fewer visible characters, because the address is fixed at 23 and the emoji weighs 2. For SMS the page reports the encoding and the number of parts: 160 plain letters are 1 message, 161 are 2 (153 each, joined), and "Café déjà vu — see you at 7 😀" switches to UCS-2 because of the emoji and the dash, so it counts 30 units against a limit of 70. Characters such as the euro sign, square brackets and curly braces take two places even in the standard alphabet: "Pay €5" is 7 places for 6 characters. For an essay or abstract choose a custom word limit; a 650-word essay is about 2 min 44 s of silent reading, and a 1,200-word talk about 6 min 33 s aloud before pauses.

Limits of any word counter

Counters agree on English and other space-separated languages but not on everything. Chinese and Japanese are written without spaces, so a space-based counter reports one huge word; for those languages the character count is the useful figure. Abbreviations such as Dr. or e.g. followed by a space look like the end of a sentence, so the sentence count can run high in text full of them. Hyphenated words, numbers with punctuation and URLs each count as one word here, but other tools may split them. Finally, the official counters of X, Google Ads and publishers are authoritative: use this page to get close, and confirm in the final field when a limit is strict.

Sources and related calculators

Sources: X Developer Platform, “Counting characters” (docs.x.com) and the twitter-text configuration file v3; Google Ads Help, “About responsive search ads” (headline 30, description 90 characters); Google Search Central, “Control your snippets in search results” (no meta description length limit); 3GPP TS 23.040 and TS 23.038 for SMS lengths and the GSM 7-bit alphabet; M. Brysbaert, “How many words do we read per minute? A review and meta-analysis of reading rate,” Journal of Memory and Language 109 (2019). Related: reading time calculator, typing speed calculator, password entropy calculator and number to words converter.