Count words, characters, sentences, paragraphs and reading time live as you type. No upload, no signup, nothing stored.
This word counter runs entirely in your browser. Nothing is sent to a server, and your text is never stored anywhere. Every metric updates the moment you type or paste, so there's no button to click and no waiting around.
Each stat tells you something different. Word count is the headline number most assignments, editors, and content briefs care about. Character count matters when you're writing for platforms with hard limits, such as Twitter/X, SMS, or meta descriptions. Sentence count is a quick proxy for readability: too few long sentences can make writing feel dense, while many short ones can feel choppy. Reading time is estimated at 200 words per minute, a widely-used benchmark for average adult reading speed on the web.
Your text never leaves your browser, nothing is uploaded.
Every metric recalculates instantly as you type.
No signup, no limits and no watermarks, ever.
Fast and responsive on desktop, tablet and mobile.
Most assignments specify 500 to 2,500 words. Paste your draft to check where you stand before submitting, and catch any gap between what you wrote and what was asked.
Comprehensive how-to guides and pillar pages tend to perform well at 1,500 to 2,500 words. Shorter news or opinion pieces can work at 400 to 800 words if they fully answer the question.
Twitter/X: 280 characters. LinkedIn: posts under 1,300 characters avoid the "see more" cut. Instagram captions: up to 2,200 characters. Facebook: no hard limit but 40 to 80 characters drives more engagement.
Google typically displays 150 to 160 characters. Paste your description and check the character count before adding it to your CMS. Anything longer gets cut off with an ellipsis in search results.
Cover letters: 250 to 400 words is the standard sweet spot. Cold sales or outreach emails that convert tend to land between 50 to 150 words, enough to explain the value, short enough to get read.
Plan for roughly 130 to 150 words per minute at a comfortable speaking pace. A 10-minute speech is about 1,300 to 1,500 words. Check your reading time estimate and divide by about 0.65 for spoken delivery.
Type straight into the box or paste a draft from Word, Google Docs, Notes, or an email. The counts start moving from the first keystroke.
Words, characters, characters without spaces, sentences, paragraphs, and reading time all sit above the box and refresh live. There's no button to press.
Trim or expand your text and watch the numbers change. It's the fastest way to land on a 160-character meta description or a 500-word essay.
Use "Copy text" to grab the edited version for your document, or "Clear text" to start over. Nothing is saved once you leave the page.
Here's how a few common inputs break down, so you know what to expect before you paste anything.
Paste the sentence The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog. and you'll see 9 words, 44 characters, 36 characters without spaces, and 1 sentence. Reading time is under a second, so it shows as less than a minute.
A meta description such as Free online word counter that shows words, characters, sentences and reading time as you type. No signup, private by design. comes in at 128 characters, comfortably inside Google's usual 160-character display limit.
Drop in a finished 500-word college paragraph and you'll see 500 words with a reading time of about two to three minutes, a quick sanity check before you submit.
Some SMS gateways and database fields count only visible characters. If you're near a hard cap, check the "No spaces" number rather than the full character total.
Reading time assumes 200 words a minute of silent reading. People speak slower, closer to 130 to 150 words a minute, so a script always runs longer out loud than the estimate shows.
Stretching a tight 400-word answer to 800 with filler usually reads worse, and for web content it rarely helps rankings. Answer the question fully, then stop.
Copied text often carries double spaces or stray line breaks that quietly inflate the count. If a number looks wrong, clean it up with Remove Line Breaks and recount.
Get your ideas down before you worry about length. Checking the total after every sentence breaks your flow and rarely improves the writing.
A 300-word product blurb and a 2,000-word guide are different jobs. Deciding the length up front saves a painful trim or an awkward stretch at the end.
Editors care about words. Twitter/X and meta descriptions care about characters. Speakers care about minutes. Read the stat that matters for the job.
Because the numbers update live, you always see the current total. Give it one last look right before you paste into your CMS or hit submit.
Yes, and it always will be. No account, no subscription, no file size limits. Just paste your text and get your counts instantly.
Completely. The entire counting process runs as JavaScript in your browser. Nothing you type is transmitted to a server, logged, or stored anywhere. You can use it offline if you already have the page loaded.
Reading time is based on 200 words per minute, a commonly used benchmark for average adult reading speed on the web. Keep in mind that technical content, academic text, or anything with lots of numbers will usually take longer to read than that estimate suggests.
"Characters" is the total count of every character in your text, including spaces, punctuation, and line breaks. "No spaces" counts only non-whitespace characters. Some publishing platforms, SMS standards, and databases quote limits using character counts that exclude spaces. That's what "No spaces" is for.
Hyphenated words like "well-known" or "state-of-the-art" are counted as one word, because word count splits on spaces. This matches how most word processors (Microsoft Word, Google Docs) handle hyphens.
At 200 words per minute, a 5-minute read is roughly 1,000 words. A 10-minute read is around 2,000 words. For spoken delivery (a speech or podcast), budget about 130 to 150 words per minute instead, which means a 5-minute talk is closer to 650 to 750 words.
It depends on the purpose. A quick news item or FAQ answer can work at 300 to 500 words. A how-to guide or product review typically needs 800 to 1,500 words to be thorough. Long-form SEO content targeting competitive keywords often runs from 1,500 to 3,000 words or more. The right length is whatever fully answers the reader's question. Padding hurts more than it helps.
Yes. The tool is fully responsive and works on any screen size: phone, tablet, or desktop. The stats grid adjusts automatically so all six counts remain readable on smaller screens.
Once the page has loaded, yes. All the counting happens in your browser, so if you lose your connection the tool keeps working. Reload the page while offline, though, and it won't open.
Small differences are normal. Word processors handle edge cases like numbers, symbols, and standalone punctuation slightly differently. For plain prose the totals usually match within a word or two, which is close enough for almost any brief or assignment.
It counts any language that separates words with spaces, so French, Spanish, German, and most European languages work fine. Languages without spaces between words, such as Chinese or Japanese, are better measured by character count.
There's no set limit. You can paste a single tweet or an entire dissertation. Very large documents (tens of thousands of words) may take a brief moment to recalculate on older phones, but everything stays on your device.
Sentences are counted by full stops, question marks, and exclamation points. Paragraphs are counted by blank lines between blocks of text. Abbreviations like "Dr." or "e.g." can occasionally nudge the sentence count, so treat it as a close guide rather than an exact figure.