Word Counter

More than just a word counter

A word counter measures the length of a piece of writing by tallying its words, characters, sentences, paragraphs, and lines. This one adds an estimated reading time and live platform limit indicators, and every figure recalculates on each keystroke rather than on a button press - so you can watch a draft approach its target instead of checking it afterward.

The counting rules are worth stating plainly, because different tools disagree. A word here is any run of non-whitespace characters bounded by spaces, tabs, or newlines. That means well-known counts as one word, e.g. counts as one, and an em dash with spaces around it counts as one - the same convention Microsoft Word and Google Docs use, which is why the numbers agree with them. Sentences are detected by a period, question mark, or exclamation point followed by whitespace, a heuristic that over-counts around abbreviations likeDr. and Inc.

For writers: most publishing targets are word counts, not page counts. A standard manuscript page is about 250 words, adult commercial fiction usually lands between 80,000 and 100,000 words, and a magazine feature brief for "1,200 words" means within roughly ten percent of it.

For students: check an essay against its limit without switching windows. Note that institutions differ on whether footnotes, block quotations, the abstract, and the reference list count toward the total - confirm the rule before trusting any single number, including this one.

For social and marketing: the live indicators track Twitter/X at 280 characters, Instagram captions at 2,200, LinkedIn posts at 3,000, Facebook at 63,206, and a single SMS segment at 160. SMS deserves a caveat: that 160 figure applies to the GSM-7 alphabet, and a single emoji or curly apostrophe switches the message to UCS-2 encoding, dropping the per-segment limit to 70 characters.

How is reading time calculated?

Reading time divides your word count by 200 words per minute, the figure most commonly cited for silent adult reading of general prose. It is an average, not a law: research summarized by Brysbaert (2019) puts non-fiction reading nearer 238 wpm and technical material considerably slower, while reading aloud runs closer to 150 wpm. Treat the estimate as a planning aid - useful for sizing a blog post or a conference talk, not precise enough to schedule against.

Counting runs entirely in your browser, and drafts are kept only in your ownlocalStorage so a reload does not lose them. Nothing is transmitted, which makes the tool safe for unpublished manuscripts and confidential drafts.