Counts as you type. Useful for anything with a limit — an essay, a meta description, a bio field, a submission with a word cap — and the counts update on every keystroke without a round trip to anywhere.
Characters are counted the way people see them
An emoji like 👋🏽 is one character to a reader and several to a computer: it is a base emoji plus a skin-tone modifier, which is four UTF-16 code units. Counting naively gives 4, which is wrong by every human measure and also wrong for most platform limits.
Characters here are counted as grapheme clusters — what a person would call one character — using the browser's own text segmentation. The byte count is shown separately, since that is what actually matters for a database column or a network protocol.
What the platform limits are
Common ones worth knowing: a Google search-result title is truncated around 60 characters and a meta description around 155–160. A tweet is 280 characters, counting most emoji as two. An Instagram caption is 2,200. A LinkedIn headline is 220. An SMS is 160 characters in GSM-7, but a single non-GSM character — a curly quote, an emoji, an em dash — switches the whole message to UCS-2 and drops the limit to 70.
Reading and speaking time
Reading time uses 238 words per minute, the mean from a 2019 meta-analysis of silent reading of English prose. It is a mean of a wide distribution — individuals range from about 175 to 300 — so treat it as a rough guide, not a measurement. Speaking time uses 150 wpm, which is roughly the pace of a clear presentation; conversation runs faster and audiobooks slower.
Keyword frequency
The frequency list excludes the most common function words by default, since a list topped by "the" and "of" tells you nothing. What remains is a reasonable proxy for what a piece of writing is actually about, and it is a fast way to catch a word you have leaned on too heavily.
Other names for this
Also searched as “character counter”, “word count tool”, “letter count”, “count words online”.
Questions
- Does it count hyphenated words as one or two?
- One. Words are split on whitespace, so "well-known" is a single word — which is how Microsoft Word and Google Docs count it too.
- Why is my character count different from Twitter’s?
- Twitter counts most non-Latin characters and emoji as two. This tool counts what a reader would call one character, and shows the byte count separately.
- Is my text saved anywhere?
- No. It stays in this tab and is never transmitted. Nothing is stored between visits either.