Word Counter

How to count words in a piece of text

Paste or type on the left. Everything updates as you go: words, characters with and without spaces, sentences, paragraphs, and how long the text takes to read.

Nothing to press. Nothing is sent anywhere.

How long a talk actually is

Reading aloud runs at about 130 words a minute. Silent reading is nearer 225.

That gap is why talks overrun. A five minute slot is roughly 650 words, not the 1,100 the reading-time estimate implies, and people write to the reading number because it is the one every tool shows. Both are here, side by side, for exactly that reason.

If the text is technical, or has numbers in it people need to absorb, take off another ten percent. Nobody has ever finished early by writing less.

Your longest sentence is the useful number

A word count tells you whether you are within a brief. It tells you nothing about whether the writing works.

The longest sentence does. It is shown in full, with its length and the average alongside it, because a single 58 word sentence in a text averaging 14 is the one thing on the page a reader will stumble over. You can see it, and you can fix it in thirty seconds.

That is the number no plain counter gives you, and it is the only one here that suggests an action.

What counts as a character

What you can see. An emoji is one.

Most counters disagree, because they count code units: an emoji is two, a flag is four, and an emoji with a skin tone modifier can be more. So a post you were told is 289 characters may well be 280 by the count that matters, or the reverse. Counting here goes through grapheme segmentation, which is the rule that matches what you can point at on screen.

Platforms then apply their own rules on top, which is a separate problem.

The sentence count is approximate

A sentence ends at a full stop followed by a space. So does an abbreviation.

"Mr. Smith went to Washington" therefore counts as two sentences rather than one, and there is no way around it without a dictionary of abbreviations. Titles, initials and "e.g." all break it the same way. Take the count as a guide.

For a specific platform limit

This tool answers how long the text is. If the question is whether it fits, the LinkedIn character counter is the one you want: it knows the 3,000 character limit and shows where the feed truncates a post, which is a different and more useful thing than a total.

Two more worth knowing about. The readability checker turns the sentence lengths here into a Flesch score and names the three hardest sentences, which is the next question once you know one of them is 58 words long.

And the AI text cleaner removes the invisible characters that inflate a character count for no visible reason, which is the usual answer to "why does this say 41 characters when I count 38".

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