🔤 Word & Character Counter

Words, characters, and why they differ

This tool counts characters with and without spaces, words, sentences, and paragraphs. Words are separated by whitespace, so hyphenated compounds such as "state-of-the-art" count as one word, while an em dash surrounded by spaces separates two.

Character counts diverge from word counts in ways that matter. English averages roughly five characters per word plus a space, so a 500-word piece runs to about 3,000 characters. Languages differ sharply: German compounds inflate character counts, while Chinese and Japanese pack far more meaning into each character.

Limits you are likely to be counting against

Note that SMS drops to 70 characters per message if any non-Latin character appears, because the encoding switches from GSM-7 to UCS-2. A single emoji in an otherwise plain message can more than double the number of messages sent.

Reading time and pacing

Average adult reading speed for general prose sits around 200 to 250 words per minute. Technical material runs slower, often 100 to 150. Spoken delivery is slower still: presentation scripts are usually timed at 120 to 150 words per minute, which makes a five-minute talk roughly 650 to 750 words.

Those figures are useful for planning rather than precision. If you are writing to a time limit, reading the draft aloud with a stopwatch beats any estimate — most people speak faster when nervous and slower when reading unfamiliar text.

Common questions

Does the count match Microsoft Word?

Usually within a word or two. Word treats certain hyphenated and apostrophised forms slightly differently, and it counts text in headers, footnotes, and text boxes depending on settings.

How are sentences detected?

By terminal punctuation — full stops, question marks, exclamation marks. Abbreviations such as "e.g." and "Dr." can inflate the count slightly, which is unavoidable without full language parsing.

Is my text sent anywhere?

No. Counting happens entirely in your browser and nothing is transmitted or stored.

How do I write to a character limit without losing meaning?

Cut qualifiers first — "very", "quite", "in order to", "it should be noted that". They consume characters without adding information. Passive constructions are the next target, since the active form is almost always shorter.

Does the count include line breaks?

Line breaks are counted as whitespace, so they appear in the with-spaces total and not in the without-spaces one. Some publishing systems count them differently, which is worth checking against a hard limit.