About the Word & Character Counter
A live text counter built for writers, students, and anyone working within limits.
What it is
The Word & Character Counter gives you instant, live counts the moment you start typing or paste text into the box — no button to click, no page to refresh. It tracks six statistics simultaneously and updates them in real time as you write or edit.
Everything runs in your browser. Your text is never sent to a server, stored, or logged anywhere. Close the tab and it's gone.
What it counts
Words
Counts whitespace-separated tokens, matching the word count rules used by Microsoft Word and Google Docs.
Characters
Total character count including spaces — useful for Twitter, meta descriptions, and character-limited fields.
No Spaces
Character count excluding whitespace — useful for SMS limits, certain platforms, and print typesetting estimates.
Sentences
Detects sentence boundaries based on terminal punctuation (. ! ?) followed by whitespace or end of text.
Paragraphs
Counts blocks of text separated by blank lines — useful for tracking content structure and density.
Read Time
Estimated reading time based on 238 words per minute, rounded up to the nearest minute.
Who it's for
Students
Hit assignment word limits precisely without guessing or copy-pasting into a word processor.
Writers & editors
Track length targets for articles, blog posts, and scripts. Estimate how long a piece takes to read.
Marketers
Optimise meta descriptions (under 160 characters), tweet copy (under 280), and ad headlines.
Developers
Count characters in strings, error messages, labels, and UI copy without leaving the browser.
Completely free
No sign-up, no rate limit, no premium tier. Paste a 200-word paragraph or a 50,000-word manuscript — it handles both instantly. If you find it useful, sharing it with someone who needs a quick word count is all we ask.