Count words, characters, reading time and more — instantly.
The Word Counter counts words, characters, sentences, paragraphs and reading time in real time as you type or paste text. Use it for essays, cover letters, social media posts and any content with a word or character limit.
Type or paste your text into the textarea. The counters update with every keystroke: total words, characters with and without spaces, sentences, paragraphs, average words per sentence, longest word, and a reading-time estimate. The platform-limits panel below shows whether your text fits a tweet (280 chars), an Instagram caption (2,200), a YouTube title (100), a LinkedIn post (3,000), a meta description (160), or a Facebook post. Stop-word density and unique-word count round out the analytics for writers and content marketers.
Words are tokens separated by whitespace; "well-known" is one word, "isn't" is one word, "$3.50" is one word. Sentences count terminating punctuation (. ! ?) with simple guards against decimals. Paragraphs split on double line-breaks. Reading time uses 230 words per minute, the median for adult silent reading on screens. Stop-word density is the share of common short words (the, a, of, and…) — a high ratio often correlates with vague writing. Unique-word count divided by total words gives a "lexical diversity" hint.
Hitting an essay word target, fitting a personal statement under a strict cap, trimming a LinkedIn post to the 1,300-char preview limit, planning a podcast script (≈150 words per minute spoken), or sanity-checking that your blog draft is the length you promised.