Word Counter — Count Words, Characters & Reading Time
This free word counter tallies the words, characters, sentences, and paragraphs in your text and estimates reading and speaking time. Reading time is based on roughly 200–250 words per minute for adults, while speaking runs slower at about 130–150. It is handy for hitting platform limits — a meta description under 155 characters, a title tag of 50–60, or a 280-character post. It counts characters with and without spaces. Everything runs in your browser, so your text is never uploaded or stored.
✨ Pro Tips for Best Results
- SEO Length: Aim for 1,500 - 2,500 words for deep-dive blog posts to maximize search visibility.
- Readability: Keep sentences under 20 words to ensure your content is accessible to a general audience.
- Paragraphs: Break text every 3-4 sentences (roughly 100 words) to prevent "walls of text" on mobile devices.
Common Social Media Character Limits (2026)
LinkedIn Post: 3,000 chars
Instagram Caption: 2,200 chars
Pinterest Desc: 500 chars
TikTok Desc: 4,000 chars
How word and character counting works
A word counter splits your text on whitespace characters — spaces, tabs, and newlines — and counts non-empty tokens. Hyphenated words like well-known count as one word. Contractions (don't, it's) count as one word each. The character count includes every character in the text, including punctuation and spaces. Sentences are detected by counting terminal punctuation marks (. ! ?).
Reading time is estimated at 238 words per minute, a widely used average for adult silent reading of general-purpose text. Technical content, academic papers, and code-heavy writing is typically read at 100–150 wpm; casual blog posts at 250–300 wpm. This tool processes your text entirely in your browser — nothing is uploaded to any server.