Word Counter

How does this word counter count?

As you type or paste, it shows words, characters with and without spaces, sentences, paragraphs, pages and reading and speaking time, plus how the text counts on X. Copy counts puts all the numbers on your clipboard in one go. The counting happens in your browser, so the text is never uploaded.

• Words: anything between spaces, tabs or line breaks, the way Microsoft Word counts. Extra spaces never add words, mother-in-law is one word and 2026 is one word. Chinese and Japanese, written without spaces, count one word per character.
• Characters: what you see on screen. An emoji is one character, even a skin-tone or family emoji built from several pieces.
• Sentences: text ending in a period, question mark or exclamation point. The period in $3.50, in Dr. or Jan., or after an initial does not end a sentence.
• Paragraphs: blocks of text separated by line breaks.

What we tested

Tricky inputs, typed into this counter:

Why does my character count change from one tool to another?

Because there are three ways to count the same text, and each one is right for its purpose. Take Café 👍🏽:

So a bio that fits here can be rejected by a website form, and the reverse. The maxlength rule is in the HTML standard, which measures the limit in UTF-16 code units. Plain English text with no emoji gives the same number everywhere except on X, where every link counts as 23.

How does X (Twitter) count characters?

X does not count characters one by one, so a plain character counter can say 270 while X says you are over. This counter follows X's open-source counting library (twitter-text, version 3, checked in October 2026):

Over 280, press Split into a thread. The text is cut into posts at the end of a sentence when possible, never inside a link, with optional 1/5 numbering that is counted in each post. X Premium allows posts of up to 25,000 characters; this counter checks against the standard 280. It counts and splits, but it does not post or schedule anything. Links with rare generic endings may not be recognized, so the count can be lower than X's for those.

How many pages, minutes of reading or minutes of speech is my text?

The tool uses 500 words per page at 12-point double spacing, 238 words per minute for silent reading (a 2019 review of 190 reading studies) and 140 words per minute for a talk:

Writing a speech? A 5-minute talk is about 700 words, a 10-minute one about 1,400. Fonts, margins and how fast you speak all move these numbers, so treat them as targets.

How do you count syllables?

The syllable total appears next to the readability score, and Syllables per line lists every line with its count: the way poems, song lyrics and haiku are checked. With three lines, it also says whether they follow the 5-7-5 haiku pattern.

Syllables are estimated from spelling, counting groups of vowels and dropping a silent final e. That is right for most words, but a few, such as fire, poem or every, can be said with one syllable more or less, so read the line out loud when the count matters.

What do keyword density and readability tell you?

Keyword density lists your five most-used content words with a count and a percentage of the total, skipping filler words like "the" and "and". It shows what your text is really about and flags a word you have leaned on too hard.

Readability gives a grade level and a 0 to 100 reading-ease score using the Flesch-Kincaid method. Aim for grade 7 to 9 for a general audience. Shorter sentences and shorter words raise the score and make the writing easier to read.