Word & Character Counter

The Word and Character Counter gives you an instant breakdown of any text: words, characters with spaces, characters without spaces, lines and sentences. Paste or type, and the figures update so you always know where you stand against a limit.

All of this happens in your browser the instant you paste, so even long documents are analysed immediately and nothing you enter is uploaded or stored.

Length limits are everywhere, and overshooting them is easy to do by accident. A tweet caps at 280 characters, an SMS at 160, a search engine typically shows about 155 to 160 characters of a meta description, and essays, abstracts and form fields often have their own word or character ceilings.

Words are counted by splitting on whitespace, so any unbroken run of non-space characters counts as one word and leading or trailing spaces are ignored. It is a simple, predictable rule that matches what most word counts mean in practice.

The two character figures answer different questions. Characters counts everything, including spaces and line breaks, which is what messaging and meta-tag limits measure. Characters without spaces excludes all whitespace, which is closer to how much you actually typed.

Character counting is done by code point, so an emoji or an accented letter counts as one character rather than the two or more units some naive counters report. Sentences are estimated by splitting on . ! and ?, and a block with no ending punctuation still counts as one.