Word & Character Counter

Word Counter shows how long a piece of writing really is while you write it. Words, characters, sentences, paragraphs, reading time and speaking time all update on every keystroke, along with your most used keywords.

It is built for the limits people actually hit: a 155-character meta description, a 280-character post on X, an Instagram caption or a text message that must stay in one SMS. Each has a bar showing how much room is left, or how far over you are.

The counts are careful with real-world text. An emoji such as 👍🏽 or a family emoji counts as one character, the way you see it, not as the four to eight hidden codes inside it. Words are found with your browser’s own language rules, so Russian, Thai, Hindi and Arabic are counted properly. Your text never leaves the page: nothing is uploaded or stored unless you ask for it to be remembered.

1. Type in the “Your text” box, paste into it, or press “Open .txt” to load a plain text or Markdown file. You can also drop a .txt file onto the box.
2. Read the live line under the box for words and characters, and the “Counts” panel for everything else.
3. Check “Character limits” to see whether your text fits on X, Bluesky, Threads, Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube, Google results or one SMS.
4. Use “Top keywords” to spot overused words. Switch to “Two-word phrases” or untick “Hide common words” to see more.
5. Select part of the text to count just that part, then press “Copy” to copy the whole text.

• Twelve live counts, from words and characters to words per sentence and the longest word.
• Ten limit checks with progress bars: X post (280), Bluesky (300), Threads (500), Instagram caption (2,200) and bio (150), LinkedIn post (3,000), YouTube title (100), search page title (60), meta description (155) and SMS.
• An X counter that follows the platform’s published weighting: emoji and Chinese, Japanese or Korean characters count as 2 and every link as 23.
• An SMS check that knows the two alphabets phones use: 160 plain characters per message, or 70 once an emoji or special letter appears, and how many messages a longer text splits into.
• Top 10 keywords with how often each appears and its share of all words, as single words or two-word phrases, with an optional filter for common English words.
• Selection counts, and adjustable reading and speaking speeds (238 and 140 words per minute to start).
• Opens .txt and .md files up to 20 MB, and “Undo clear” rescues a mistaken clear.

• Line breaks count as one character each, as on X and in text messages. Microsoft Word leaves them out, so its count can be slightly lower.
• Hyphenated words such as “well-known” count as one word, as in Word and Google Docs. Emoji on their own are not words.
• Sentences are found from full stops, question marks, exclamation marks and line breaks. Common abbreviations such as “Dr.” and “e.g.” don’t end a sentence, but a rare abbreviation might be counted as one.
• “Paragraphs” counts every line that has text on it, which matches pressing Enter between paragraphs. Blank lines are skipped.
• Apps disagree about emoji: Bluesky counts one, X counts two, some sites count more. Near a limit, leave some room.