Word & Character Counter
Instant counts for words, characters, sentences, paragraphs and lines, plus reading time, keyword density and character frequency.
| Counts | Start typing to see counts update live. |
| Top words | Word frequency and density appear here. |
| Character frequency | Most common characters appear here. |
What actually counts as a word?
Three reasonable definitions give three different answers for the same text, and no counter tells you which one it used:
| Definition | Rule | “Hello, world! 你好” |
|---|---|---|
| Whitespace-separated | Split on spaces | 2 |
| Letter-and-digit runs | [\p{L}\p{N}]+ | 3 — counts 你好 as one word |
| Unicode word segmentation | Intl.Segmenter | 3, but splits Chinese by dictionary rather than as one run |
This tool uses letter-and-digit runs as its headline number, because it is predictable and
matches what most editors report. Punctuation-only tokens such as — are not
counted as words.
Why character counts disagree
Ask three tools how long café 👋 is and you may get 6, 7 or 9. All three are
right, because they are measuring different things:
- UTF-16 code units (JavaScript
.length) — emoji count as 2. This is what a naive counter reports. - Unicode code points — emoji count as 1, but a combining accent still counts separately.
- Grapheme clusters — what a human sees as one character, including "é" written as e + combining accent.
- Bytes — the actual storage size in UTF-8, which is what a database column limit or an SMS segment counts.
The panel reports all of them. If a form tells you your input is too long, it is almost always counting bytes, which is why 280 emoji can blow past a 140-byte limit.
Limits you are probably measuring against
| Where | Limit | Counted in |
|---|---|---|
Page <title> for search results | ~60 characters | Characters, before pixel truncation by Google |
| Meta description | ~155 characters | Characters |
| SMS single segment | 160 characters | GSM-7 characters; 70 if any Unicode is present |
Database VARCHAR(255) | 255 | Characters in MySQL; bytes in some engines |
| Reading speed | ~200–250 words/minute | Words, for prose in the reader's first language |
Frequently asked questions
How is reading time calculated?
Words divided by 200 per minute, then rounded up to the nearest second. Speaking time uses 130 words per minute, which is a typical deliberate presentation pace. Both are estimates for skilled adult readers of familiar prose.
Why is keyword density shown with stop words removed?
Because "the", "and" and "of" otherwise occupy most of the top of the list and tell you nothing. Turn the checkbox off when you need raw counts.
Does whitespace affect the word count?
No. Runs of whitespace are collapsed, so multiple spaces, tabs and blank lines do not add words. They do affect the character and byte counts.
Is there a size limit?
No hard limit. Everything is computed on your device, so very large documents simply take as long as your browser needs.
Privacy. Your text never leaves your browser. Nothing is uploaded, stored or logged, so drafts, contracts and unpublished writing are safe here.