Character Counter

Count the words, characters, and reading time of any text as you type.

Use it to check a post against a word limit, estimate reading time for an article, or get a quick character count for a bio field.

Every number updates as you type: words, characters shown two ways (the raw total and the total with spaces stripped out), sentences, and lines. The reading-time estimate assumes about 200 words a minute, rounded up to at least one minute, so a short caption still reads as "1 min" instead of "0 min".

Counting runs locally in this browser tab - no upload and no account. Nothing you type is saved; refresh the page and the box clears.

The two character counts exist because a strict limit that only counts non-space characters can read differently from the raw total - extra line breaks or spacing inflate the raw number without changing the stripped one, so the stripped count is the one to check against that kind of limit.

The sentence count looks for a period, question mark, or exclamation point followed by a space or the end of the text, so a line with no closing punctuation is not counted as a finished sentence yet.

Two more counting details worth knowing if a number looks off: word count splits on whitespace, so a hyphenated compound like "well-known" or a decimal like "3.14" counts as a single word, while a stray punctuation mark surrounded by spaces counts as its own word. Line count counts newline characters, not the visual wrapping your screen shows - a long paragraph that wraps across five visual lines on screen still reports as one line as long as you never pressed Enter inside it. To see how the live counter compares with other ways to check text length, see character counter vs alternatives.

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