Word and Character Counter

What each number means

Words are runs of characters separated by whitespace. A hyphenated compound such as state-of-the-art counts as one word, and an em dash between two words does not split them unless there are spaces around it. This matches the behaviour of Microsoft Word and Google Docs, so the figure here should agree with whatever your editor or client is checking.

Characters counts everything you typed, spaces and line breaks included. This is the number that social platforms, form fields and SEO tools mean when they set a limit. The second figure strips all whitespace, which is what some translation and typesetting quotes are based on.

Characters are counted by grapheme rather than by code unit, which matters more than it sounds. An emoji such as a flag or a family is stored as several code units internally, but a reader sees one character — and so does this counter. Accented letters built from combining marks behave the same way.

Reading time and speaking time

Reading time assumes 200 words per minute, the common average for an adult reading on a screen. It is a planning figure, not a measurement: dense technical prose runs closer to 150, and light, familiar copy can exceed 300.

Speaking time uses 130 words per minute, which is the comfortable pace for a presentation or a voiceover. If you are writing a five-minute conference talk, that puts your script at roughly 650 words — most people badly overestimate how much text fits into a slot, and this is the fastest way to catch it before rehearsal.

Common length targets

• Google title tag — around 60 characters before it is truncated in search results. Google measures pixel width rather than characters, so a title full of wide capitals may cut off sooner.
• Meta description — about 160 characters. Front-load the important part, since the tail is what gets clipped.
• Blog post — 1,000 to 2,000 words is the range most in-depth articles land in. Length alone does not rank a page, but a thin post rarely covers a topic well enough to compete.
• Email subject line — under 50 characters, because mobile clients show far less than desktop ones.

Why sentence counts are approximate

A sentence is detected by its terminating period, question mark or exclamation point. That heuristic is wrong in a predictable way: abbreviations such as Dr., e.g. and Inc. each add a phantom sentence, while a run-on joined by semicolons counts as one.

Distinguishing those cases reliably needs full language analysis, which would mean either a much heavier download or sending your text to a server. Neither trade is worth it for a number most people use as a rough guide, so the simple rule stays — just be aware of it if your text is heavy with abbreviations.

Your text stays private

Counting happens as you type, in your browser. Nothing is uploaded, stored or logged, which makes this safe for unpublished drafts, client work under NDA, or anything else you would not paste into a service that keeps a copy.