Word Counter
Paste or type your text and every number updates as you go: words, characters with and without spaces, sentences, paragraphs, reading and speaking time, and the words you use most. The table below shows how many characters you still have on X, Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube and in Google results.
- Words
- 0
- Characters
- 0
- Characters (no spaces)
- 0
- Sentences
- 0
- Paragraphs
- 0
- Reading time
- 0 s
- at 238 words per minute
- Speaking time
- 0 s
- at 150 words per minute
Top keywords
Words of three or more letters, common stop words removed.
Keywords appear here once your text has a few words.
Character limits by platform
Remaining characters for the text above. X counts every link as 23 characters and most CJK characters as two, so treat its number as a close estimate.
| Platform | Limit | Remaining |
|---|---|---|
| X (Twitter) post | 280 | 280 |
| SMS, one segment (GSM-7) | 160 | 160 |
| Google title (shown before truncation) | ~60 | 60 |
| Meta description (Google snippet) | ~160 | 160 |
| YouTube video title | 100 | 100 |
| Instagram caption | 2,200 | 2,200 |
| LinkedIn post | 3,000 | 3,000 |
| YouTube description | 5,000 | 5,000 |
How words, characters and sentences are counted
A word is any run of letters or digits, so "e-mail", "don't" and "2026" each count once and punctuation never counts as a word. The counter uses your browser's built-in text segmentation (the same rules the browser uses when you double-click a word), which also splits Chinese and Japanese text into words instead of treating a whole line as one.
Characters are counted the way a person sees them: an emoji with a skin-tone modifier or a flag counts as one character even though it is stored as several code points. That is why this number can differ from a spreadsheet's LEN function. "Without spaces" removes spaces, tabs and line breaks. Sentences are split at end punctuation with abbreviations like "e.g." handled by the segmenter, and every non-empty line counts as a paragraph, which matches text pasted from email and web pages.
Average English words are about 4.7 letters long, so a quick rule of thumb is that 1,000 words fill roughly 5,500 to 6,000 characters including spaces. If your text is stuck inside a PDF, convert the PDF to Word first; for a photo or screenshot of a page, run it through image to text and paste the result here.
Where 238 and 150 words per minute come from
Reading time uses 238 words per minute, the average silent reading speed for English non-fiction found by Marc Brysbaert's 2019 review of 190 studies covering about 18,000 readers. Fiction is read a little faster, around 260 words per minute, and technical text slower, so treat the figure as a typical adult reading an article.
Speaking time uses 150 words per minute, a comfortable pace for presentations, podcasts and wedding speeches. Nervous speakers often run at 170 or more; if a five-minute slot matters, aim for about 700 words and rehearse with a stopwatch.
Character and word limits worth knowing
X has allowed 280 characters per post since November 2017, up from 140, although links always count as 23 characters. Google does not cut titles at a fixed number of characters but at a pixel width of about 600 pixels, which in practice is 50 to 60 characters; meta descriptions are usually trimmed around 155 to 160. A single SMS holds 160 characters of plain Latin text but only 70 once it contains an emoji or a non-Latin letter.
Essays usually set word limits rather than character limits. The Common App personal essay allows 650 words, and many scholarship and job applications ask for 250 to 500. Keep an eye on the keyword list too: when a word other than your topic shows up with a density above three or four percent, it often reads as repetition.
Frequently asked questions
- Is the text I paste into the word counter uploaded or saved?
- No. All counting runs in your browser tab. The text is never sent to a server and is not stored, so closing the tab erases it.
- Why does my character count differ from Microsoft Word or Google Docs?
- Editors differ on emoji, line breaks and footnotes. This counter treats each visible symbol, including a composite emoji, as one character and counts line breaks as whitespace, so totals can differ by a few characters on text with emoji or many paragraphs.
- How many words are in a 5-minute speech?
- At a relaxed 150 words per minute, about 750 words. Leave room for pauses and audience reactions by writing closer to 650 to 700.
- How many pages is 1,000 words?
- Roughly two pages single-spaced or four pages double-spaced in a 12-point font with standard one-inch margins.
- What counts as a keyword in the keyword table?
- Any word of three or more letters that is not a common function word such as "the", "with" or "which". The table shows the ten most frequent, with their share of the total word count.