How to count words and characters in your text

Live word, character, sentence, and paragraph counts — plus reading time — for anything with a limit.

Word and character limits are everywhere: essays and abstracts, meta descriptions (about 155 characters), tweets (280), LinkedIn posts, grant applications, cover letters. The Toolsfully word counter updates every count live as you type or paste. And because people paste unpublished drafts and personal documents into word counters, this one is built so your text never leaves your device.

Step-by-step

1. Open the Word Count tool. Go to Text Tools — the Word Count tab is selected by default.
2. Paste or type your text. All six tiles — words, characters, characters without spaces, sentences, paragraphs, and reading time — update instantly.
3. Edit in place. Trim your text right in the box and watch the counts drop until you're under the limit.

Tips

• Reading time uses 200 wpm. That's the widely used average for adult silent reading — handy for estimating blog posts and speeches.
• "Characters" includes spaces. Most platform limits (like Twitter/X) count spaces, so use the main character tile. The "without spaces" tile is there for assignments that specify it.
• Paragraphs are separated by line breaks. Blocks of text separated by one or more empty lines each count as a paragraph.

Tools disagree because "word" is not defined

If two counters give you different numbers for the same text, neither is necessarily broken. Counting words requires deciding what a word is, and the reasonable answers differ. Is a hyphenated compound — "state-of-the-art" — one word or four? Does an em dash joining two words without spaces separate them? Is "don't" one word, and is "O'Brien"? Are numerals words? Is a bare URL one word or the count of its punctuation-separated parts?

Most counters split on whitespace, which makes hyphenated compounds one word and contractions one word. Some editors split on word characters instead and reach a higher number. Neither is wrong, and the gap between them is usually one to three per cent — irrelevant for a blog post and worth knowing about when a limit is hard.

When the limit is characters, and when counting words is meaningless

Publishers and forms often specify characters rather than words, and then specify whether spaces count. The two figures differ by roughly a sixth in English prose, so a limit of 2,000 characters with spaces is a very different limit from 2,000 without — check which is meant before trimming.

For Chinese, Japanese and Korean the question does not really apply: written without spaces between words, the text has no whitespace boundaries to split on, and a whitespace-based count will report a handful of "words" for a page of writing. Length in those languages is conventionally measured in characters, which is both well defined and what any limit you are given will actually mean.

Frequently asked questions

How are words counted?

Any run of characters separated by spaces or line breaks counts as a word — the same method word processors use, so counts should match what your teacher or editor sees.

Is there a length limit?

No practical one — it comfortably handles book-length text, all locally.

Is my text private?

Completely. Counting happens in your browser; nothing you paste is sent anywhere.