Convert text between upper, lower, title, camel, snake and kebab case.
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Category: Text
Word Counter
Count words, characters, sentences and reading time.
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Details
About this tool
Counts words, characters with and without spaces, sentences, paragraphs and estimated reading time, updating as you type. Paste a draft and the numbers are there before you have finished scrolling.
Most of the reason to count is that somebody else set a limit. A meta description is cut off around 155 characters, a title around 60. A tweet is 280. SMS bills per 160 characters, and drops to 70 the moment one emoji makes the message Unicode. University essays, grant applications and job postings all come with a word count that is checked. Knowing where you stand while writing is easier than trimming afterwards.
Characters are counted as the reader sees them, which is not always what a naive count returns: an emoji is one character here even though it may be several bytes, and accented letters count as one. Words are runs separated by whitespace, so hyphenated compounds count as one and an em dash between words does not merge them. Sentences are terminated by a full stop, question mark or exclamation mark, which handles ordinary prose well and abbreviations imperfectly - no counter gets "e.g." right without a dictionary.
Reading time assumes about 200 words per minute, the usual figure for an adult reading ordinary prose on screen. Treat it as a rough guide rather than a measurement: technical material, tables and anything the reader stops to think about run far slower, and skimming runs much faster. The text stays in your browser, which is the point when the draft is unpublished.
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Good to know
Questions people actually ask
- How is reading time estimated?
- At roughly 200 words per minute, the common figure for an adult reading prose on a screen. It is a guide, not a measurement - dense technical writing, code samples and tables all read considerably slower, and a skim is much faster.
- How are words counted exactly?
- As runs of characters separated by whitespace. A hyphenated compound counts as one word, a number counts as one, and punctuation attached to a word does not add another. This matches how most editors and word processors count, which matters when somebody else's limit is what you are writing to.
- Why does my character count differ from Twitter or an SMS?
- Because those platforms count differently on purpose. Twitter weights some scripts at half a character and counts every URL as a fixed length regardless of the real one. SMS allows 160 characters in its own 7-bit alphabet but only 70 once any character forces the message into Unicode - one emoji is enough to do that.
- Is the text sent anywhere?
- No. Counting happens in your browser as you type, so an unpublished draft, a cover letter or a client document never leaves your device.