Why a word counter still matters
Modern writing happens against limits. A meta description that hits 165 characters disappears mid-sentence on Google. A tweet pushed to 281 characters refuses to send. A blog post that runs 4,200 words when the brief said 1,500 burns the editor's afternoon. The shortest path to good writing is knowing, exactly and immediately, how many words and characters you have, and how that maps to where the writing will land.
This tool counts as you type. Everything runs in your browser, the results update on every keystroke, and the page never sends your text anywhere.
How the counts are computed
A counter is only as good as its definitions. Here is exactly what each number means.
Words. A word is any run of non-whitespace characters separated from the next run by a space, tab, or line break. "Don't" is one word. "Self-driving" is one word, because the hyphen is not whitespace. "Email me, quickly" is three words. This is the same rule Microsoft Word, Google Docs, and most professional editors use, so the count you see here will agree with what your CMS or editor reports.
Characters. Two numbers, because two platforms care. The first count includes every character including spaces and line breaks, which is what X (Twitter), SMS, and most CMSes use. The second strips spaces and matches the number that some legacy SEO tools and academic word-count rules use. Pick whichever matches your target.
Sentences. Counted by splitting on terminal punctuation (period, question mark, or exclamation mark) followed by whitespace or end of text. The classic edge case is abbreviations: "Dr. Smith said yes." may register as two sentences. Every word counter on the open web has this limitation; the only way around it is a real natural-language parser, which would slow the tool to a crawl on long documents.
Paragraphs. Counted by splitting on blank lines. Two consecutive newlines (with optional whitespace between them) mark a paragraph break.
Lines. Counted by hard line breaks. Soft-wrapped lines that look like multiple lines on screen but are actually one long line in the source count as one. This matches what your editor sees.
Pages. Calculated at 250 words per page, which is the academic-standard 12pt Times New Roman, double-spaced, 1-inch-margin layout used by US universities and most style guides. Single-spaced documents fit roughly twice that, so 500 words per page. The Pages tile shows the double-spaced number because that is the version everyone asks about when they say "how many pages is 1,000 words."
Syllables and reading grade level
Syllables matter because they drive the most widely used readability scores. We count vowel groups in each word with a few rules for silent trailing e and consonant + le endings. The heuristic agrees with formal counts about 95 percent of the time on regular English prose, which is enough accuracy for grade-level signals.
The Reading Grade tile reports the Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level, a US-school-grade index that combines words per sentence and syllables per word. Grade 8 means "comfortably readable by a typical US 8th grader." For most general-audience writing, aim for grade 7 to 9. Plain-language briefs and marketing copy aim lower, around grade 6. Academic and technical writing land at 12 and above.
Flesch Reading Ease is the inverse view of the same data. Higher is easier. 60 to 70 is "standard," 30 to 50 is "fairly difficult," under 30 is "very difficult." For the full six-formula readability suite (SMOG, Gunning Fog, ARI, Coleman-Liau, and both Flesch indices) use the dedicated Readability Score Checker.
Platform character limits, demystified
Most "character limits" people quote are wrong by 5 to 50 characters because the rules change quietly. Here is what the bars on this tool are actually checking.
SEO title tag, 60 characters. Google truncates the visible title to roughly 580 pixels of horizontal space on desktop search results. Because most title-tag characters average around 9 to 10 pixels wide, 60 characters is the safe ceiling. Mobile gets even less; some pages truncate at 50.
YouTube title, 100 characters. Hard cap. The visible portion in feed and recommendations is closer to 60, so front-load the hook.
Meta description, 160 characters. The exact pixel cap is 920 on desktop and around 680 on mobile, which works out to about 155 to 160 characters. Going slightly over isn't catastrophic, Google will simply cut the snippet mid-word and append an ellipsis, but it costs you the persuasive last clause that gets the click.
Single SMS, 160 characters. A GSM-7 encoded SMS message holds 160 characters in one segment. Cross 160 and the message splits into two segments, which means double the cost on most carriers and a longer delivery path. If your SMS includes any Unicode character (an emoji, a curly quote, an accented letter), the cap drops to 70 per segment.
Tweet (X), 280 characters. Standard X post limit for free accounts. Premium users get up to 25,000, but the public-engagement sweet spot remains around 70 to 100 characters because longer posts get truncated in feed previews.
Bluesky post, 300 characters. Hard cap, counted in graphemes so emoji and combining marks count as one character each.
Instagram caption, 2,200 characters. Hard cap. After about 125 characters the caption is collapsed behind a "more" link, so the first sentence does the heaviest lifting.
LinkedIn post, 3,000 characters. Hard cap. After roughly 210 characters the post collapses behind a "see more" toggle. The first three lines decide whether anyone expands.
The progress bars on this counter use these exact numbers and turn red the instant you cross any of them.
Reading time and speaking time, the honest version
"Average reading speed" is one of those numbers everyone quotes and almost no one defends. The widely cited 250 words per minute comes from research on adult silent reading of moderately complex prose on screen. Slow it to 200 WPM for technical writing, non-native readers, or anything dense with numbers. Speed it up to 300 WPM only for skim reading, narrative prose someone is half-paying-attention to.
Speaking is different. Conversational pace runs about 130 words per minute. Podcast hosts and audiobook narrators average closer to 150 to 160. Keynote speakers drop to 100 to 110 on stage to give the audience time to absorb. The speaking-time tile uses 130 WPM because that is the most useful default, what you would hit reading your draft out loud at a normal pace.
Both numbers are estimates, not promises. They exist to set rough expectations: a 1,500-word post is roughly six minutes of reading or twelve minutes of speech, give or take how dense the writing is.
Top keywords, density, and accidental repetition
The Top keywords panel ranks the most-frequent words after stripping common stop words like "the," "of," and "is," and now shows the density percentage next to each count. It exists for one specific use: catching repetition you didn't notice. If "however" shows up nine times in a 600-word piece, that is the kind of thing an editor will circle in red. Catching it before they do saves a round.
For full keyword-density analysis (single words, two-word, three-word, and four-word phrases with percentages of the document) switch to the dedicated Keyword Density Checker. This counter is for fast feedback while you write; the density tool is for SEO audits after you finish.
Privacy: the text never leaves the tab
Every calculation on this page runs in JavaScript inside your browser. There is no server call, no analytics event tied to your text, no log file, no cache. You can disconnect from the internet, paste a confidential draft, and continue counting; the page will keep working because it doesn't need a network. The URL stores configuration like your reading-pace preference, but never the text itself, so a copied URL leaks nothing about what you were writing.
This matters because writers paste sensitive things into counters all the time: pre-publication essays, NDA-bound briefs, draft emails to lawyers, internal memos. Most online counters quietly send your text through a server. We don't.
A short field guide to picking the right limit
If you take nothing else from this tool, take this:
- Writing for search: keep titles under 60 and meta descriptions under 160. Cuts that hit "below the fold" on Google.
- Writing for social: Tweet 280, Bluesky 300, Instagram 125 (before the "more"), LinkedIn 210 (before "see more"). The hard caps matter less than the soft ones.
- Writing for mobile messaging: single SMS is 160. Plan for 1 segment unless you are using emoji, in which case it is 70.
- Writing long-form: count words, not characters. A 1,500-word post takes about 6 minutes to read and fills about 6 pages double-spaced. Check the platform's "ideal length" for the topic before you commit.
The right tool tells you the number. The right writer decides what to do about it.