How to count your words and characters
- Type or paste your text into the box above. The six stat tiles, characters, characters without spaces, words, sentences, paragraphs and reading time, update live as you go.
- Watch the platform limit rows underneath. Each shows how many characters you have left and flips to red the instant your draft runs over that channel's cap.
- Trim until every limit you care about is back in the black, then paste your final text into X, LinkedIn, your CMS or your email tool. Use Sample to see it in action or Clear to reset.
Every platform truncates or rejects text past its limit. X cuts you off at 280 characters, Google snips meta descriptions around 160, YouTube hides a title past 100, and a LinkedIn post over 3,000 characters simply will not publish. When you draft in one tool and paste into another, you usually discover the overflow after it has already clipped your call to action or your punchline. Seeing every limit at once, live, means you catch it while you can still edit.
The people who lean on this hardest are the ones writing to a hard ceiling: social media managers packing a hook into a tweet, SEO writers keeping a meta description inside Google's snippet, students hitting an exact word count on an assignment, and support teams fitting a notification into a single 160-character SMS. Novelists and bloggers use the word and reading-time figures to pace chapters and articles, and translators watch the character count to keep UI strings from breaking a layout.
How reading time is estimated
The reading-time figure takes your word count and divides it by 200 words per minute, then rounds to the nearest minute. That 200 wpm figure is the common industry benchmark for adult silent reading of general prose; academic estimates for English range from roughly 200 to 250 words per minute, and most blog platforms settle near the lower end so their estimates never feel rushed. Dense, technical or unfamiliar material naturally reads slower, so treat the number as a friendly guide for a blog post or newsletter rather than a stopwatch, it is there to help you decide whether a piece is a two-minute skim or a ten-minute deep read.
Frequently asked questions
How many characters can a post be on each platform?
X (Twitter) allows 280 characters, Instagram and TikTok captions 2,200, LinkedIn posts 3,000, YouTube titles 100, and SMS messages 160. Google typically shows about 160 characters of a meta description and 60 of a title tag before truncating.
Does the counter count spaces and emoji?
Spaces count toward every platform's limit, so the main character count includes them, and a separate no-spaces figure is shown too. A single emoji can count as two or more characters on some platforms, so leave a little headroom whenever you use them.
How is reading time calculated?
Reading time divides your word count by 200 words per minute, the widely used average for adult silent reading, and rounds to the nearest minute, the same convention most blogging platforms apply to their article estimates.
How are words, sentences and paragraphs counted?
Words are runs of characters separated by spaces or line breaks. Sentences are counted by terminating punctuation, periods, question marks and exclamation points. Paragraphs are blocks of text separated by a blank line.
Do I need to click a button to get the count?
No. Every figure updates live as you type or paste, and the platform limit rows turn red the instant you go over. There is no Count button, use Sample to see an example and Clear to reset.
Is my text sent anywhere when I count it?
No. Counting happens in your browser with plain JavaScript, so a draft post, an essay or a confidential paragraph never leaves your device or gets stored.