How to count words, characters and reading time in any text
Essays, meta descriptions, tweets and speeches all have limits. Word counter updates as you type.
What you get
Words, characters (with and without spaces), sentences, paragraphs, lines, estimated reading time, speaking time and your five most used words of four or more letters.
Steps
- Type or paste your text.
- Read the statistics beside it.
Useful limits
- Meta description: around 150-160 characters.
- SEO title: about 60 characters.
- Tweet-length posts: check platform limits, which change.
How the times are estimated
Reading time assumes about 238 words per minute and speaking time about 150 words per minute. These are averages; slow or technical material takes longer.
Tips
- The most-used words list helps you spot repetition in a draft.
- Words are counted with Unicode support, so Hindi and other languages work.
- Need to extract text from a document first? Use PDF to text.
- Fix capitalisation with Case converter.
Limits
Counts depend on definitions. Hyphenated words and numbers count as one word each, and software such as Word may count slightly differently.