How to use it
Type or paste text into the box. All counts update with every keystroke, so you can trim an essay, a post or a product description to a limit as you edit.
What each number means
- Words: runs of letters or digits. “Well-known” and “rock’n’roll” are one word each; a stand-alone dash or emoji is not a word.
- Characters: every character including spaces and line breaks.
- Characters without spaces: the same, minus all whitespace.
- Sentences: pieces of text ending in a full stop, question mark, exclamation mark or ellipsis that contain at least one letter or digit.
- Paragraphs: blocks separated by an empty line.
- Reading and speaking time: words ÷ 238 per minute for silent reading, words ÷ 140 per minute for speaking.
Typical length limits
| Where | Limit |
|---|---|
| Search result title | about 50–60 characters |
| Meta description | about 150–160 characters |
| X (Twitter) post | 280 characters |
| SMS | 160 Latin characters per message |
Tips
Abbreviations with dots (“e.g.”, “Dr.”) can be counted as sentence ends, so treat the sentence count as an estimate for such texts. For a speech, the speaking time is a better guide than the word count: 1,000 words take about 7 minutes to say.