Quick answer
Paste your text above to see words, characters with and without spaces, sentences, paragraphs and reading time instantly. Words are runs of letters or digits separated by spaces or punctuation, the same way Microsoft Word and Google Docs count them.
How does the word counter work?
A word counter checks text length before you submit an essay, publish a post or send a message. Besides words and characters, it compares your text with common limits such as SEO titles, meta descriptions, X posts and SMS parts. Everything is counted in your browser and your text is never sent anywhere.
How to count words and characters
- 1
Type or paste text into “Your text”. The “Paste” button reads your clipboard (your browser may ask for permission).
- 2
Read the Words, Characters, Characters without spaces, Sentences, Paragraphs and Lines boxes; they update as you type.
- 3
Check “Common limits”: a bar turns red when a title, description or post is over the limit.
- 4
Look at “SMS message” to see which encoding your text uses and how many parts it takes.
- 5
Use “Most frequent words” to avoid keyword stuffing, and “Clear” to start over.
Common length limits
These are widely used reference figures; the tool uses exactly these thresholds for its progress bars.
| Content | Reference limit | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Page title (title tag) | About 50–60 characters | Google truncates by display width, not a fixed character count. |
| Meta description | About 150–160 characters | Anything longer is usually cut with “…”. |
| X (Twitter) post | 280 characters | Standard accounts; every link counts as 23 characters. |
| SMS, GSM-7 text | 160 characters per message | Concatenated: 153 per part. |
| SMS with Unicode (UCS-2) | 70 characters per message | Concatenated: 67 per part. |
Platform limits change over time; double-check with the platform you publish on.
How counting works
| Example | Result | Rule |
|---|---|---|
| New York | 2 words | Words are separated by spaces. |
| 3.5 · e-mail · don't | 1 word each | A . , ' - _ between letters or digits does not split a word. |
| 20/10/2026 | 3 words | The “/” splits the digits into 20, 10 and 2026. |
| é · 👍🏽 · 👨👩👧 | 1 character each | Counted as visible characters (graphemes), including combined emoji. |
| Spaces, tabs, line breaks | Included in “Characters” | Removed in “Characters without spaces”. |
| Sentence ending in . ! ? … or a line break | 1 sentence | A line with only symbols and no letters is not a sentence. |
Real-world examples
Blog title and description
Paste your title: if the “SEO title” bar turns red (over 60 characters), Google may truncate it. Do the same for the description and keep it under about 160 characters.
Customer service SMS
“Your café order #42 is ready” uses only GSM-7 characters (é is in the GSM alphabet), so it fits in one 160-character message. Add a curly quote or an emoji and the whole message switches to 70 characters per part.
500-word essay
The brief says “500 words maximum”: the Words box gives you the count the way most schools and publishers measure it.
A 600-word talk
600 words take about 2 min 37 s to read (230 wpm) and about 4 minutes to speak (150 wpm). Use it to plan a video or presentation.
Common mistakes
- Fewer words than expected after pasting from a PDF.
- PDFs sometimes glue words together or break lines inside words. Scan the pasted text and add missing spaces.
- A plain-looking message still counts 70 characters per part.
- One character outside GSM-7 (most accented letters, emoji, curly quotes, en dashes) switches the whole message to UCS-2. The SMS box names the character responsible.
- Character count differs from Word.
- Word often counts a combined emoji as several characters; this tool counts what you see. The Characters box also includes line breaks.
- “Paste” says it cannot read the clipboard.
- Some browsers block clipboard access. Click the text box and press Ctrl+V (⌘V on Mac).
- The SEO title bar measures my whole article.
- The bar measures everything in the box (with whitespace collapsed). Paste only the title or description to measure it.
Glossary
- Grapheme
- One character as a reader sees it, which may be several Unicode code points (for example an accented letter or a combined emoji).
- GSM-7
- The 7-bit SMS alphabet for basic Latin text: 160 characters per message.
- UCS-2
- The 16-bit SMS encoding for any Unicode character: 70 characters per message.
- Concatenated SMS
- A long message split into parts; each part reserves room for a header, leaving 153 or 67 characters.
- UTF-8
- How text is stored on the web; basic Latin uses 1 byte per character, accented letters 2–3 bytes, emoji 4 bytes.
Frequently asked questions
How are Vietnamese words counted?
Each syllable is one word, because Vietnamese writes syllables separated by spaces: “Việt Nam” is 2 words, matching Word and Google Docs.
What is the “UTF-8 size” box for?
It shows how many bytes the text takes when saved or sent, useful when a system limits bytes rather than characters. “Xin chào Việt Nam” has 17 characters but 20 bytes.
How are reading and speaking times estimated?
Word count divided by 230 words per minute (reading) and 150 words per minute (speaking). Real times vary with the reader and the material.
What does “Most frequent words” ignore?
Numbers and very common words such as “the”, “and”, “of” (and Vietnamese “và”, “của”, “là”), so your real keywords stand out.
Why does my carrier report a different number of SMS parts?
The tool follows the GSM standard. Carriers and sending services may strip accents, add a brand signature or cap the number of parts.
Can it handle a 1 MB document?
Yes. Texts of a few hundred thousand characters are counted in under a second; for very long texts the numbers may update a beat after you stop typing.
Is my text stored anywhere?
No. It only lives in your browser and disappears when you close the page.
Ratings and comments
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