Word Counter with Characters, Sentences and Reading Time
Whether you are writing an essay with a word limit, a meta description, a social post or a speech, this word counter gives you all the key numbers at once. It shows words, characters, sentences, paragraphs and lines, plus reading and speaking time.
The text is analyzed in your browser. Drafts, essays and confidential documents are never uploaded.
What you get
- Words and unique words (distinct words, ignoring capitalization).
- Characters with spaces and without spaces.
- Sentences, paragraphs and lines.
- Average word length in characters and average sentence length in words.
- Reading time and speaking time.
Example
The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog. It was a sunny day,
and the fox felt playful!
Meanwhile, the dog kept sleeping. Nothing could wake it up — not
even the fox.
Words: 33 Characters: 170 Characters (no spaces): 136
Sentences: 4 Paragraphs: 2 Unique words: 25
Average word length: 3.9 characters Average sentence length: 8.3 words
Reading time: 8 sec Speaking time: 14 secHow words are counted
A word is a run of letters or digits in any alphabet. Apostrophes and hyphens inside a word keep it together, so “don't”, “e-mail” and “state-of-the-art” each count as one word. The same rule means a date written as 2024-05-01 counts once.
Other punctuation splits words: “3.14” counts as two, and an email address such as user@example.com counts as three. Dashes, symbols and emoji on their own are not words.
Word counting relies on spaces between words. Chinese and Japanese text, which is written without spaces, is counted per unbroken run, so a whole phrase may count as one word. Use the character count for those languages.
How characters are counted
Characters are counted as Unicode code points, so an accented letter or a simple emoji like 😀 counts as one. Spaces and line breaks are included in the main total; the “no spaces” figure leaves out every kind of whitespace.
Some emoji are built from several code points. A flag such as 🇺🇸 or a thumbs-up with a skin tone counts as two characters here, and other platforms may count them differently again.
Sentences, paragraphs and lines
A sentence ends with a period, question mark, exclamation mark or ellipsis followed by a space and a capital letter, digit, quote or opening bracket. A paragraph is a block separated from the next by a blank line. Lines are simply the number of line breaks plus one. The Sentence Counter lists every detected sentence if you want to check the split.
Reading and speaking time
Reading time assumes 238 words per minute, the average silent reading speed for non-fiction reported in a large 2019 review of reading studies. Speaking time assumes 140 words per minute, a comfortable pace for presentations. Both are rounded to the nearest second:
1,000 words ÷ 238 wpm = 4.20 min → 4 min 12 sec reading
1,000 words ÷ 140 wpm = 7.14 min → 7 min 9 sec speakingReal speeds vary with the reader and the difficulty of the text. Treat the numbers as estimates, and rehearse a talk aloud if timing matters.
Common length limits
| Text | Typical limit |
|---|---|
| Meta description | about 150–160 characters before search results cut it off (the limit is based on pixel width) |
| Page title tag | about 50–60 characters |
| Post on X (Twitter) | 280 characters for standard accounts |
| SMS message | 160 characters per segment with the standard GSM alphabet; fewer when emoji or other Unicode characters are used |
| Common App personal essay | 650 words |
Always check the current rules of the platform or institution you are writing for, because limits change and some services count certain characters differently.
Tips for accurate counts
- Extra spaces do not change the word count, but they inflate the character count. Clean pasted text with Remove Extra Spaces first.
- To see which words you repeat most, use the Word Frequency Counter.
- To judge how easy your text is to read, check the Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level.