How to count your words and characters
Start typing in the box, or paste text in from anywhere. Every number updates on each keystroke.
Below the totals you get sentences, paragraphs, reading time, and a list of the words you lean on most. Scroll a little further for readability scores. Then trim or pad until you hit the number you actually need.
What the character counter measures
Two numbers, not one: characters including spaces, and characters excluding them. That gap matters more than people expect, because platforms disagree about what counts. Some count spaces, some do not, and a few count a single emoji as two characters. Seeing both totals at once saves you the guesswork when you are squeezing copy into a fixed slot.
Character limits worth knowing
| Where | Limit |
|---|---|
| SMS, plain text | 160 characters |
| SMS, with any emoji or accent | 70 characters |
| X post | 280 characters |
| Instagram caption | 2,200 characters |
| LinkedIn post | 3,000 characters |
| YouTube title | 100 characters |
| Google title link | roughly 60 characters |
| Google description snippet | roughly 155 characters |
The two Google rows say roughly for a reason. Google truncates search snippets by pixel width, not by character count, so a title full of capital W's gets cut sooner than one full of lowercase i's. Sixty is a rule of thumb, not a rule.
The SMS trap nobody warns you about
Add one emoji to a text message and your limit drops from 160 characters to 70. Not gradually. Instantly.
Plain SMS uses an encoding called GSM-7, which spends 7 bits per character and fits 160 of them into a single message. The moment you include a character that GSM-7 does not have, which covers every emoji, most accented letters, and any non-Latin script, the whole message switches to UCS-2 at 16 bits per character. A message cannot mix the two encodings, so every character in it now costs the higher rate.
One smiley face at the end of a 150-character message turns it into three billed segments. Sending campaign texts at volume? That is triple the cost, for one emoji.
Multi-part messages are tighter again: 153 characters per segment on GSM-7, 67 on Unicode. Each segment gives up a few characters to the data that stitches them back together.
Why your word count differs from Word or Google Docs
A word here is any run of characters with whitespace around it. Word and Google Docs do the same thing. Most of the time, all three agree.
The gaps show up at the edges. "State-of-the-art" counts as one word here and in Word. Some tools call it four. Numbers written like 1 000 000 read as three words to any counter that splits on spaces. A stray double space, or line breaks pasted out of a PDF, can nudge a total either way.
Got a hard limit and you are within ten words of it? Check in whatever tool your marker or editor uses. Two counters agreeing is not something to bet a grade on.
Reading time, speaking time, and keyword density
Reading time assumes 200 words a minute. Speaking time assumes 130. Both are adult averages and both are rough, since a dense technical paragraph takes longer than a chatty one of the same length.
Speaking time is the one worth trusting if you are timing a talk or a video script. About 130 words a minute is unhurried delivery. Push past that and you sound rushed on camera. Keyword density then lists the words you lean on most, skipping filler like "the" and "and". Writers use it to catch a crutch word they keep reaching for. SEO people use it to confirm a page is actually about its topic. Nobody should chase a target percentage. Keyword stuffing stopped working about twenty years ago.
What the readability scores actually mean
Flesch Reading Ease runs 0 to 100. Higher is easier. Above 60 reads fine for a general audience. Below 30 and you are writing for specialists, whether you meant to or not.
The other three work differently. Flesch-Kincaid, the Automated Readability Index, and Coleman-Liau each estimate the US school grade needed to follow your text. All of them count sentence length, word length, and syllables. None of them check whether you made any sense.
Now the odd part. These scores carry legal force in some places.Florida Statute 627.4145says an insurance policy sold in the state has to score at least 45 on Flesch Reading Ease. Other states run similar rules. Somewhere right now, an insurance lawyer is chopping a sentence in half to satisfy a formula published in 1948.
Frequently asked questions
Does this count words the same way as Microsoft Word?
Usually, yes. Both count runs of non-space characters. Hyphenated compounds, numbers with internal spaces, and text pasted out of a PDF are where the two can drift apart by a word or two.
Can I paste a whole chapter?
Yes. There is no length limit. Counts stay live no matter how much text you drop in.
Why did my SMS split into multiple messages?
Almost always an emoji or an accented character. Either one pushes the message from GSM-7 to Unicode encoding, which cuts the per-message limit from 160 characters to 70.
What is a good Flesch Reading Ease score?
For general writing, 60 to 70. News and consumer content usually lands there. Academic and legal writing regularly sits under 30, which is readable for the intended audience and punishing for everyone else.
Is keyword density still worth watching?
As a sanity check, yes. As a target to hit, no. Search engines stopped rewarding repetition a long time ago, and writing to a percentage produces text that reads badly to humans.
Does it count characters with or without spaces?
Both, at the same time. The two figures sit next to each other, because different platforms count differently and you often need to know which one you are up against.
Related: check social post limits · clean up messy pasted text · strip line breaks from a PDF paste · change text case.