Word Counter
Words, characters, sentences, and reading time — live.
100% in your browser — nothing uploadedCount words and characters in your text
Google meta: ~155 · X/Twitter: 280 · SMS: 160 characters
About this word counter
Type or paste text and watch every metric update live: words, characters with and without spaces, sentences, paragraphs, and estimated reading and speaking time. Useful for essays with word limits, meta descriptions, tweets, and video scripts.
Reference limits sit under the counters for the targets people usually chase — Google meta descriptions, X/Twitter posts, SMS. Two of those are enforced by a platform. The Google one is not. Google’s own documentation says there is no limit on how long a meta description can be, and that the snippet is truncated in search results as needed, typically to fit the device width. The familiar 155 characters is a community rule of thumb measured from live results, and because the cut is by pixel width rather than character count, a line full of W and M truncates earlier than a line full of i and l. Treat it as a target to aim at, then look at the real result.
Every counter has to choose definitions, and different tools choose differently — which is why your number here and your number in Word rarely match to the digit. Here a word is any run of non-whitespace characters, so "state-of-the-art" counts as one and double spaces do not inflate the total. A sentence is a period, question mark, exclamation mark or ellipsis followed by whitespace or the end of the text, which over-counts abbreviations ("Dr. Smith went to Washington. He left." reads as three) and under-counts when the period sits inside a closing quote ("Say “hi.” Then go." reads as one). A paragraph is a block separated by a blank line. If a word limit is contractual, do the final count in the tool your reader will use.
The character count is UTF-16 code units — the same unit JavaScript, Java and the Windows API use, and not what a person would call a character. A plain emoji such as 😀 counts as 2, a flag such as 🇵🇷 counts as 4, a multi-person emoji can reach 8, and an é typed as e plus a combining accent counts as 2 where the precomposed é counts as 1. If a pasted paragraph counts higher than you expect, decomposed accents are usually why. Platforms then count differently again: X normalizes text to NFC first and weights emoji and CJK characters as 2 against its 280, while SMS drops from 160 characters to 70 the moment a single character falls outside the GSM-7 alphabet.
Reading and speaking time are estimates from fixed rates — 225 words per minute reading, 150 speaking. They are round numbers, not a measurement of your reader. The best available figures come from Brysbaert’s 2019 meta-analysis of 190 studies and 18,573 participants: adults read English non-fiction silently at about 238 words per minute, fiction at 260, and aloud at 183, with wide individual spread. Dense material full of code blocks, tables or unfamiliar terms reads far slower than any of those. Use the estimate to decide between a three-minute piece and a ten-minute one, not to print a promise in a byline.
Character and word limits that actually matter
Half the limits people quote are enforced by a platform and half are display truncation dressed up as a rule. The difference decides whether going over costs you a rejected post or just a trimmed preview.
| Where | Limit | The catch |
|---|---|---|
| Google meta description | None published | Google: no limit on length, the snippet is "truncated in Google Search results as needed, typically to fit the device width". ~155 is a measured rule of thumb. |
| Google title link | None published | Same wording in the title-link docs. The common ~60 characters is pixel-derived, so wide letters cut sooner. |
| X / Twitter post | 280 weighted units | Latin text and punctuation weigh 1; emoji and CJK weigh 2. Text is normalized to NFC before counting. |
| A link inside an X post | 23 characters | Every URL is wrapped in t.co, so the original length is irrelevant — short or long, you pay 23. |
| SMS, GSM-7 encoding | 160, or 153 per segment | The 140-byte payload holds 160 seven-bit characters; multipart messages spend 7 characters on a header. |
| SMS, UCS-2 encoding | 70, or 67 per segment | One character outside GSM-7 — an emoji, a curly quote, an á — switches the whole message, not just that character. |
| LinkedIn feed post | 3,000 characters | Stated in LinkedIn’s own help pages; longer text has to become an article. |
The two Google rows are the ones people most often get wrong. There is no penalty for a long meta description and no reward for hitting exactly 155 — an over-length description is simply cut, and Google may ignore your description entirely and generate a snippet from the page instead. What is worth optimising is putting the thing that earns the click inside the first hundred characters or so, where it survives on a phone.
| Activity | Words per minute | Basis |
|---|---|---|
| Silent reading, non-fiction | 238 | Brysbaert 2019 meta-analysis, 190 studies, 18,573 participants |
| Silent reading, fiction | 260 | Same meta-analysis; the gap is explained by word length |
| Reading aloud | 183 | Same paper, 77 studies and 5,965 participants |
| This tool | 225 reading / 150 speaking | Deliberately conservative round numbers — divide your word count by any rate above to re-estimate |
Two practical notes on the rates. They are averages for adult native readers of English, so children, older adults and non-native readers all come in lower, and there is no comparably sourced figure for most other languages. And a "5 minute read" badge computed from any of these numbers is a genre convention, not a measurement — which is fine, as long as nobody is planning a conference slot around it.
How to count words in Google Docs, Word and Excel
In Google Docs it is Tools > Word count, or Ctrl+Shift+C (⌘+Shift+C on a Mac), and the dialog carries a "Display word count while typing" checkbox. One documented detail catches people out: unless you select a section first, the count covers everything except headers, footers and footnotes.
In Word the count sits in the status bar and updates as you type; click it for characters, paragraphs and lines. Select a passage and the bar shows that selection’s count alongside the whole document’s.
Excel has no word count function at all — there is none in Microsoft’s text function reference. The workaround counts the spaces instead:
=LEN(TRIM(A1))-LEN(SUBSTITUTE(TRIM(A1)," ",""))+1It returns 1 for an empty cell, so wrap it in =IF(LEN(TRIM(A1))=0,0,…) when the column has gaps. TRIM also only strips the ASCII space, character 32, so text pasted from a web page keeps its non-breaking spaces and counts short.
The counter above gives words, characters with and without spaces, sentences and reading time at once, live, with no helper column.
Reference tables
FAQ
How is a word counted?
Any run of characters separated by whitespace. Hyphenated compounds like "state-of-the-art" count as one word.
How is reading time estimated?
At 225 words per minute, a common average for adult silent reading. Speaking time uses 150 words per minute.
Is my text stored anywhere?
No. Counting happens in your browser and the text is discarded when you close the page.