Word & Character Counter
Count words, characters, sentences, and estimated reading time.
How this tool works
Paste or type your text
Drop in anything from a tweet draft to a full essay.
Watch the counts update live
Word, character, sentence, and paragraph counts refresh as you type - no button to click.
Check the reading time estimate
See roughly how long the piece takes to read aloud, based on average reading speed.
Trim to fit your limit
Keep editing until the count matches whatever cap you’re writing against.
Quick facts
- Category
- Text Tools
- Best for
- Checking blog posts or essays against a word limit
About this tool
Paste any text to instantly see word count, character count (with and without spaces), sentence count, paragraph count, and estimated reading time, all updating live as you type rather than requiring a separate "count" button. This covers the handful of limits people actually run into day to day: a strict word cap on an essay or cover letter, a character limit on a meta description or a tweet, or just wanting a rough sense of how long a piece of writing will take to read out loud. Sentence and paragraph counts are detected from punctuation and line breaks, so they’re a close approximation rather than a guaranteed-exact grammatical count. Useful for essays, meta descriptions, social posts, and any word-limited submission. Runs entirely client-side, so nothing you paste is uploaded anywhere.
Why use this tool
Six metrics at once
Words, characters (with and without spaces), sentences, paragraphs, and reading time, all in one view.
Updates as you type
No "count" button to press - every keystroke refreshes the numbers immediately.
Built for real limits
Matches the caps people actually hit: tweet length, meta description length, essay word counts.
Works on any text
No formatting requirements - paste plain text, markdown, or copied web content directly.
Frequently asked questions
Reading time is estimated at an average adult reading speed of about 200 words per minute, rounded up to the nearest minute.
Word counting works by splitting on whitespace, so it works well for space-separated languages. Languages without spaces between words (like Chinese or Japanese) will show character count as the more meaningful metric.
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