Word Counter with Characters and Reading Time

What this word counter counts, and how

Type or paste into the box and every number updates on each keystroke; there is no Analyze button and nothing leaves your browser. A word is any run of letters or digits, with internal apostrophes and hyphens kept together, so don't, well-known and COVID-19 each count as one word. Letters from any script count, so the word counter works for Spanish, German, Hindi or Russian as well as English, although languages written without spaces between words, such as Chinese and Japanese, will be undercounted.

The character counter shows two figures. Character count with spaces is every character in the text, including spaces, tabs and line breaks. Character count without spaces removes all whitespace and is the number many essay and form limits refer to. Both are counted as Unicode code points, so an accented letter or most emoji count once rather than two or three times as they would in a raw byte count.

The sentence counter splits on full stops, question marks, exclamation marks and ellipses followed by a space or the end of the text, and a final sentence with no punctuation still counts. Abbreviations such as e.g. or Dr. followed by a space are treated as sentence ends, so very abbreviation-heavy text can read slightly high. The paragraph counter counts blocks separated by at least one blank line; single line breaks are reported separately as lines.

Reading time, limits and keyword frequency

Reading time is words divided by 238 words per minute, the average silent reading speed for adult English non-fiction found in a 2019 meta-analysis of reading-rate studies. Speaking time uses 140 words per minute, a typical pace for a talk or video voice-over. Treat both as estimates: technical documentation with code samples reads slower, and a light blog post reads faster.

The limit checker compares your text with common caps: 280 characters for an X (Twitter) post, 160 characters for a meta description, 60 characters for an SEO title tag, 3,000 for a LinkedIn post, 160 for a single SMS and 250 words for an abstract. The bar turns red and shows how far over you are. X weights links and some emoji differently and Google truncates snippets by pixel width, so the page says so next to those presets rather than pretending the count is exact.

The keyword frequency panel lists the ten most frequent words with their count and share of all words. Common stop words such as the, and and is are skipped by default; untick the box to include them. It is a quick way to notice that you have used the same word eight times in a short paragraph.

Word Counter vs Content Word Statistics

TechLogHub has two related tools. This page is the fast, live counter for drafting: counts while you type, limit presets and a keyword list. Content Word Statistics, linked below the tool, runs a one-shot analysis aimed at editing a finished piece. It adds average sentence length and highlights the longest sentence and longest word, which helps you find passages to split. Use the word counter while writing and Content Word Statistics before publishing.