Word & Character Counter
Paste or type text to count words, characters, sentences, and more.
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Words
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Characters
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Characters (no spaces)
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Sentences
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Paragraphs
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Reading time
How It Works
Word counters are useful for essays and academic papers (minimum word requirements), social media posts (Twitter's 280-character limit, LinkedIn's 3,000-character limit), SEO content (search engines favor articles of 1,500–2,500 words for competitive topics), and professional writing where brevity matters.
Reading time is estimated at 200 words per minute, which is the average adult silent reading
speed. Sentence detection uses punctuation heuristics (., !, ?) and may slightly undercount sentences with abbreviations like "Dr." or "U.S."
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Frequently Asked Questions
How are words counted?
Words are sequences of characters separated by whitespace. Hyphenated words like "well-known" count as one word. Contractions like "don't" count as one word. Numbers count as words. This matches the behavior of most writing tools.
What is the average reading speed?
The average adult reads about 200–250 words per minute silently. Speed readers can reach 400–600 WPM. Academic reading (with comprehension) is often slower, around 150–200 WPM. This tool uses 200 WPM as a conservative baseline.
How long should a blog post or article be?
SEO research suggests long-form content (1,500–2,500 words) tends to rank better for competitive keywords. However, the ideal length depends on the topic — a technical how-to may warrant 3,000+ words, while a news article may be 400. Prioritize covering the topic completely over hitting a word count.
What is the Twitter character limit?
Standard tweets are limited to 280 characters. URLs count as 23 characters regardless of actual length (Twitter wraps them). Twitter Blue/X Premium subscribers can post longer posts.