Word & character counter
Words, characters, sentences, reading time and social-media limits, live.
0 without spaces
At 238 words per minute
At 150 words per minute
Estimated
Platform limits
How it works
Everything updates as you type, and nothing is sent anywhere — the text stays in this tab.
How words are counted
A word is a run of letters or digits, optionally containing apostrophes and hyphens. So “don't” is one word and “re-open” is one word, which matches how most editors count and how most people would. Unicode letters count, so “café” and “日本語” are handled properly.
Characters and emoji
Characters are counted by code point, not by JavaScript's internal 16-bit units — so an emoji counts as one, not two. Platforms differ: X counts most emoji as two characters, and some count a skin-tone or flag sequence as several.
SMS segments
A text message holds 160 characters using the GSM-7 alphabet. Introduce a single character outside it — a curly apostrophe, an em dash, an emoji — and the whole message switches to UCS-2 at 70 characters per segment. Multi-part messages lose a few characters per segment to concatenation headers, which is why the limits drop to 153 and 67.
Reading time
238 words per minute is the mean for silent reading of non-fiction in Brysbaert's 2019 meta-analysis; speaking aloud is closer to 150. Both vary widely with material and reader.