Word And Character Counter With Reading Time

This word counter gives you five counts at once - words, characters, characters without spaces, sentences and paragraphs, plus lines - every one of them updated as you type. Around them sit the numbers that turn a count into a decision: reading time, speaking time, average words per sentence and average characters per word. It doubles as a reading time calculator for blog posts and a character counter for the boxes that cut your text off.

Who It Is For

Students with a word limit, writers with a brief, and anyone holding a draft that came back from ChatGPT or Claude longer than they wanted. It is also for the person writing a title tag, a caption or an ad headline, who needs to know not just how many characters they have typed but how many they have left.

How The Counting Works

Words are split on spaces and line breaks, so a hyphenated word and a contraction each count once, and a stray dash or a run of dots does not count at all. Characters are counted as people see them rather than as the bytes underneath, so an emoji is one character, not two or four. Sentences end at a full stop, question mark or exclamation mark followed by a space, with guards for "Mr.", "e.g." and decimals such as 1.2, so a decimal mid-paragraph does not double your sentence count. Paragraphs are blocks separated by a blank line. Chinese and Japanese are written without spaces between words, so each character there counts as one word, which is the convention every CJK counter follows.

The keyword density list shows the ten most frequent words and two-word phrases, with a common-word list removed so "the" and "of" do not take the top slots. It runs a moment after you stop typing so the counts themselves never stutter. All of it happens in your browser: no text is uploaded, and your draft only leaves your computer if you press Publish.

Limits

Sentence detection is rules, not grammar, so an unusual abbreviation can merge two sentences and a list without full stops is counted a line at a time. Character limits are counts, not pixel widths: Google measures a title by how wide it renders, and X counts every link as 23 characters, so treat both as guides. If your text needs its case fixed first, the Convert Case tool is next door; if you are writing a title tag, the Meta Tag Generator previews it as a search result.

Then Put It Online

Counting usually ends in sending something to someone, so Publish wraps your text and its statistics in a small page and puts it on a live link with HTTPS in seconds, no account needed. The link lasts 30 minutes unless you claim it, claiming is free, and from there you can pick your own address or, on a paid plan, connect a custom domain. See how it works for the rest.