Word and Character Counter
Live counts, plus the length limits that will actually bite you.
Which count you need depends on the destination
| Destination | Limit that matters | Counted as |
|---|---|---|
| Search result title | about 60 characters | Characters including spaces |
| Meta description | about 155–160 characters | Characters including spaces |
| X / Twitter post | 280 | Characters — CJK counts double |
| LinkedIn post | 3,000 | Characters |
| SMS | 160 (or 70 if any non-GSM character appears) | Characters, segmented |
| Academic abstract | 150–300 words | Words |
| Conference talk | 130–150 words per minute | Words |
| Blog reading time | about 238 words per minute | Words |
Spaces count, and so does whitespace
A 280-character limit counts spaces, punctuation and emoji. An upload field that says 'maximum 100 characters' usually means the same. Meanwhile a word count depends on what you call a word: this tool splits on whitespace, so state-of-the-art is one word while well - known is three. If your editor disagrees by a few words, the difference is almost always hyphen and whitespace handling rather than a bug.
Chinese, Japanese and Korean do not have spaces
A whitespace word count returns 500 for a 500-character Chinese article and one for a 500-character paragraph, because the script does not separate words with spaces. For CJK text the meaningful measure is the character count, and the industry-standard pricing unit for translation and editing is characters. Reading speed is also higher — around 300–500 characters per minute for dense Chinese text.
Reading time is an estimate, not a measurement
The widely used figure of 238 words per minute comes from a mid-2010s analysis of Medium article completion rates, and it falls between the academic norm of 200–250 for silent reading and the 130–150 used for prepared speech. It is a serviceable planning number. It is not a prediction of how long a specific reader will spend.
Practical implications for a page you are writing
- Keep a
<title>under about 60 characters or Google truncates it mid-phrase. - Keep meta descriptions under about 160 characters — longer text is cut, and a truncated description reads worse than a short one.
- Aim for at least a few hundred words of genuinely useful body content on any page you want indexed; a page with 40 words and a button is a page search engines classify as thin.
- For a slide deck, budget 40–60 words per slide; slides are prompts, not documents.
How to use it
- Start typing or paste your text.
- Watch words, characters with and without spaces, sentences and paragraphs update live.
- Check the reading-time estimate and compare against the platform limit in the table.
Worth knowing
- Reading speed of about 238 words per minute underlies most 'minute read' labels.
- Google truncates titles at roughly 600 pixels — about 60 characters.
- A 160-character SMS becomes two segments, which doubles the cost.
- CJK text is measured in characters because it has no whitespace word boundaries.
Limitations
- Word splitting is whitespace-based, so hyphenated compounds count as one word.
- Sentence detection relies on terminal punctuation and will treat abbreviations loosely.
- Reading time is a population average and says nothing about a specific reader.
- Emoji and combined characters can count differently depending on whether you count code units or grapheme clusters.