Word & Character Counter

How to use it

1. Paste or type your text.
2. The counts refresh on every keystroke.
3. Use “characters without spaces” when a form enforces a limit, and “reading” to sanity-check a post.

What different platforms actually count

Twitter counted 280 “characters” where every CJK glyph cost two, and every URL cost a flat 23 regardless of its real length. LinkedIn truncates at 3,000 characters but counts differently again. A word processor reports “words” using whitespace boundaries, which collapses a 500-character Chinese paragraph into a handful of words. There is no single correct number — only the number the destination platform will use, which is why a raw count and a character count are both shown.

Reading time is an estimate, not a measurement

The familiar 200–250 words per minute comes from studies of silent reading of English prose on paper. Reading from a screen is measurably slower, and technical text with numbers and unfamiliar terms slower still. Treat the reading-time figure as a floor rather than a forecast: a page that calculates to four minutes often takes a visitor six.

Drafting to a hard limit

Most writing that fails a limit fails it in three places at once: the meta description is capped at roughly 155 characters before Google truncates it, the title tag at about 60, and the body usually has a stated budget of its own. Trimming is easier against a live count than against a rough guess, because the last ten words are where the meaning usually sits.

Cut in this order: adverbs, then prepositional phrases, then the sentence that repeats what the previous one said. A 320-word abstract that needs to be 250 rarely loses an argument in the process — it usually had two sentences saying the same thing.

Frequently asked questions