Word & Character Counter
Count words, characters, sentences and reading time live.
Character counts include spaces, which is what nearly every platform limit counts. Reading time uses 238 words per minute, the average for silent adult reading.
About this tool
Live counts for words, characters, sentences and paragraphs, with estimated reading and speaking time. Character limits for the platforms people actually write against — meta descriptions, X posts, SMS — are tracked alongside.
How to use it
- Paste or type your text.
- Watch the counts update as you write.
- Check the platform limits if you are writing to a specific one.
The limits that actually bite
Different platforms count differently, and the surprises are worth knowing before you hit publish.
Meta title — around 60 characters, but really 580 pixels. Wide characters are cut earlier.
Meta description — around 155 characters, and Google rewrites it most of the time anyway.
X / Twitter — 280 characters, but URLs always count as 23 regardless of actual length, and emoji frequently count as two.
SMS — 160 characters for a single message. One non-GSM character — a curly quote, an emoji, an em dash — switches the whole message to UCS-2 encoding and drops the limit to 70. This is why a message that looks fine costs triple to send.
Instagram — 2,200 characters, truncated in the feed after roughly 125.
LinkedIn — 3,000 characters, with a "see more" cut at about 210.
The counter shows characters with and without spaces. Nearly every platform counts spaces, so that is the figure to watch.
How long should it actually be?
Word count is not a ranking factor. Longer articles correlate with better rankings because thorough content tends to be longer — not because length itself helps. Padding a 600-word answer to 2,000 words makes it worse.
That said, useful reference points:
- Meta description — 20–25 words
- Product description — 100–200 words
- Blog post — 800–1,500 words for most topics
- Comprehensive guide — 2,000–4,000, but only if there is genuinely that much to say
- Landing page — whatever it takes; the rule is that every paragraph earns its place
Reading time here uses 238 words per minute, the measured average for silent adult reading of general text. Technical content is read more slowly; fiction more quickly. Speaking time uses 150 wpm, a typical presentation pace — useful for scripting a video or a talk.
The honest test is whether a reader could skip any paragraph without losing something. If they could, cut it.
Frequently asked questions
- Are characters counted with or without spaces?
- Both are shown. Spaces count toward most platform limits, including meta descriptions and social posts, so that figure is usually the one that matters.
- How is reading time calculated?
- At 238 words per minute, the average for silent adult reading of general text. Speaking time uses 150, which is a typical presentation pace.
- Is my text saved between visits?
- No. Counting happens live in the page and nothing is written to storage or sent anywhere, so closing the tab discards the text entirely.