Word Counter
Count words, total characters, and characters excluding spaces in your text, updated instantly.
- 1Paste your text
- 2View the word and character counts instantly
What this word counter measures
The counter reports three numbers for whatever text you paste: total words, total characters including spaces, and characters excluding spaces. Words are counted by splitting the text on runs of whitespace, so "well-known" counts as one word, "don't" counts as one word, and a number such as "2,500" counts as one word. Everything is calculated in your browser as you type or paste.
Where the numbers matter
| Use | Typical limit or target |
|---|---|
| Post on X (Twitter) | 280 characters for standard accounts |
| SEO meta description | Roughly 150–160 characters before search results truncate it |
| SEO title tag | Roughly 50–60 characters |
| College application essay | Often 250–650 words depending on the prompt |
| Blog post | Commonly 800–2,000 words for in-depth guides |
| Abstract (academic paper) | Journals often set 150–300 words |
Limits vary by platform and change over time, so treat these as rules of thumb and confirm against the current requirements for your submission.
Characters with spaces versus without
Most online forms and social platforms count spaces, so use the "with spaces" figure for them. Some translation pricing and a few academic or legal submissions count only non-space characters, so the second figure exists for those. If the instructions do not say, assume spaces are included.
Estimating reading and speaking time
The tool does not print a time estimate, but you can compute one from the word count. Adults commonly read silently at around 200–250 words per minute for general content, and speech at a comfortable pace is roughly 130–150 words per minute. A 1,200-word article therefore takes about five to six minutes to read, and a 650-word speech runs close to five minutes aloud.
Practical editing tips
- Count the final version only. Paste the text after you have removed headings, citations or instructions that do not count toward the limit.
- Watch for invisible text. Text copied from PDFs often contains line breaks inside sentences. These do not change the word count, but they can change character counts slightly.
- Trim filler. If you are over the limit, phrases such as "in order to", "it is important to note that" and "very" can often be removed without losing meaning.
- Different tools disagree. Word processors, search engines and plagiarism checkers each define a "word" slightly differently, particularly around hyphens, numbers and symbols. Small differences of one or two percent are normal.
Related tools
To remove repeated lines from a list before counting, use the remove duplicate lines tool. To fill a layout with placeholder text of a known length, try the lorem ipsum generator.