This free online word counter instantly counts the words and characters in any text you type or paste, updating live as you edit. It's useful for checking essay length, meeting a required word count, or staying within social media character limits.
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Words
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Characters (Without Spaces)
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Characters (With Spaces)
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Sentences
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Paragraphs
How to Use the Word Counter
Type or paste your text into the large text box below the counts.
Watch the "Words", "Characters (Without Spaces)", "Characters (With Spaces)", "Sentences", and "Paragraphs" numbers update automatically.
Edit your text as needed - the counts refresh instantly with every change.
How Each Count Is Made
Every word counter makes choices about what counts as a word or a sentence, which is why two tools can disagree by a few words. These are the rules this one uses:
Words: the text is split wherever there is a space, tab or line break. Anything between those gaps is one word, so "well-known" is one word, "₹500" is one word, and "3 . 5" with spaces around the dot is three.
Characters with spaces: every character in the box, including spaces and line breaks.
Characters without spaces: the same total after removing all spaces, tabs and line breaks.
Sentences: the text is cut at every full stop, exclamation mark or question mark, and each non-empty piece is counted.
Paragraphs: each non-blank line counts as a paragraph, whether or not you leave an empty line between paragraphs.
Why a Count Can Look Slightly Off
Abbreviations and decimals add sentences. "Dr. Rao paid 3.5 lakh." is one sentence to a reader, but the dots after "Dr" and "3" make the tool count three.
Hindi and other Indian-language text ending with the danda (।) is not split into sentences, because only . ! and ? are treated as sentence ends. Word counts for Hindi are still correct, since Hindi words are separated by spaces.
Character counts follow the way browsers store text. An emoji usually counts as 2 characters, and a Devanagari word such as नमस्ते counts as 6, because each vowel sign and halant is a separate code point.
A dash typed with spaces on both sides ( – ) is counted as a separate word, and so is a stray symbol such as a lone bullet character pasted from another document.
Common Length Limits
Some limits people check against regularly. Platforms change their rules, so treat these as typical values and check the current limit where you are submitting:
Where
Typical limit
What to watch
Single SMS
160 characters in English, 70 in Hindi or with emoji
Characters with spaces
Post on X (Twitter), standard account
280 characters
Characters with spaces
Search result description
About 150 to 160 characters before it is cut off
Characters with spaces
School or college essay
Set by the teacher or exam board, often with 10% leeway
Words
To estimate reading time, a common rule of thumb is 200 to 250 words per minute for silent reading and about 130 to 150 words per minute for a speech. A 1,000-word article therefore takes roughly 4 to 5 minutes to read, and a 5-minute speech needs around 650 to 750 words.
Is My Text Sent Anywhere?
The counting runs as JavaScript inside your browser tab every time the text changes. The text box is not saved, so it is cleared if you refresh or close the page. Keep a copy of anything important in your own document before pasting it here.
Frequently Asked Questions
It counts the total number of words, the character count excluding spaces, the total character count including spaces, the number of sentences, and the number of paragraphs, all updated live as you type.
The tool trims extra spaces and splits your text on whitespace, counting each resulting chunk as one word. An empty or blank text box always shows a word count of 0. Sentences are counted by splitting on periods, exclamation marks, and question marks, while paragraphs are counted by splitting on line breaks.
"Characters (With Spaces)" counts everything, including spaces and line breaks. "Characters (Without Spaces)" removes all whitespace before counting, so you can see both totals side by side.
Each program treats punctuation, dashes, numbers with symbols and pasted formatting slightly differently, so small differences of a few words are normal. If a limit is strict, check the count in the tool the reader or examiner will use.
Yes. Words are counted wherever there is a space, so Hindi, Marathi, Tamil and other languages that separate words with spaces are counted correctly. The sentence count only recognises . ! and ?, so text using the danda (।) shows fewer sentences than it has.