Word & Character Counter

How it works

Everything is counted in your browser as you type. Your text isn’t uploaded or saved; only your own limit is remembered on this device.

• Words are counted like Microsoft Word and Google Docs: anything between spaces that contains a letter or a digit. “Don’t”, “e-mail” and “3.5” are one word each, and a dash or an ampersand on its own isn’t a word. In Chinese and Japanese, each character counts as a word.
• Characters are counted as you see them. An emoji with a skin tone, a flag or an accented letter is one character, even when it’s stored as several codes.
• Sentences end at a full stop, question mark, exclamation mark or ellipsis followed by a space. Abbreviations like “Dr.” can add an extra sentence to the count.
• Paragraphs are blocks of text separated by a blank line. Lines counts every line, empty ones included.
• Reading time uses 238 words per minute, the average silent reading speed of adults in a review of 190 studies (Brysbaert, 2019). Speaking time uses 150 words per minute, a normal conversational pace.

How each platform counts

Platforms don’t all count the same way, so the tool counts each one by its own rules.

Limits were checked in October 2026. Some platforms count emoji as two characters, so leave a little room when you’re close.

Text messages

A text message holds 160 characters when it uses only the standard GSM alphabet: Latin letters, digits and common punctuation. Characters like €, [ ] and ~ take two of those. One emoji, a curly quote or a letter like “š” switches the whole message to Unicode, which holds only 70 characters. Longer texts are split into parts of 153 (or 67) characters, and many plans charge each part as a separate message.

Your own limit

Enter a number and choose words or characters, for example 500 words for an essay or 1,300 characters for a cover letter field. The bar turns orange near the limit and red when you go over. The limit is saved in your browser for next time.

Word frequency

The word frequency counter lists the words in your text by how often you use them, with each word’s count and its share of all words. The top 10 show first; Show all lists every word.

• Common words like “the”, “and” and “of” are left out so the words that matter stand out. Turn on Include common words to count them too.
• Capitals don’t matter: “Router” and “router” are the same word. Numbers aren’t listed.
• Copy list copies the words and counts as two columns, ready to paste into Excel or Google Sheets.

Use it to spot a word you overuse, check that a key term appears often enough in a page you’re writing, or count word occurrences in a transcript or survey answers.