Text Count
Analyze text statistics including character count, word count, reading time, and frequency analysis
About the Text Count Tool
Character and word counts matter more than they look. Social platforms enforce hard limits, meta descriptions are truncated by search engines at roughly 155 characters, and academic or publishing submissions often specify a word count precisely.
This tool reports characters, characters excluding whitespace, words, sentences, paragraphs, lines and UTF-8 byte size, along with estimated reading and speaking times and an optional frequency analysis of the most common words and characters.
How to use it
- 1Type or paste your text, or upload a plain-text file.
- 2Read the statistics panel for counts and timing estimates.
- 3Enable frequency analysis to see the twenty most common words and characters, which is useful for spotting overused terms.
- 4Download a PDF report if you need to share the figures.
When you would use it
- Checking that a meta description fits inside the roughly 155 characters search results display, before it is truncated.
- Confirming a piece of writing meets a stated word limit before submitting it.
- Estimating how long a script or a speech will take to deliver at a natural pace.
How it works, and what it does not do
Counting runs on the server against the text exactly as submitted, reporting characters with and without whitespace, words, sentences, paragraphs, lines and UTF-8 byte length, plus a reading estimate at 200 words per minute and a speaking estimate at 150. The byte count diverges from the character count as soon as the text leaves ASCII: an em dash is one character and three bytes.
Sentence and paragraph detection is punctuation-based rather than linguistic — a sentence ends at a full stop, question mark or exclamation mark, and a paragraph ends at a blank line. That is accurate for prose and misleading for code, lists or unpunctuated text, where the word count stays correct but the sentence count does not mean much.
Frequently asked questions
How are reading and speaking times estimated?
Reading time assumes 200 words per minute, a common average for adult silent reading. Speaking time assumes 150 words per minute, closer to a measured presentation pace. Both are rounded up to the nearest minute, so very short texts show one minute rather than zero.
What counts as a sentence?
A run of text terminated by a full stop, question mark or exclamation mark. This works well for ordinary prose but over-counts for text containing abbreviations such as "e.g." or decimal numbers, since it cannot tell a sentence-ending full stop from an abbreviation.
Why do the character and byte counts differ?
Characters are counted as Unicode code points, while bytes are counted in UTF-8 encoding. Plain ASCII text has one byte per character, but characters with accents or non-Latin scripts use two to four bytes each, so the byte count is higher.
Does it count spaces as characters?
Both figures are given. The character count includes spaces, punctuation and line breaks, while the "characters without spaces" figure strips all whitespace. Different platforms mean different things by "character limit", so check which one applies to you.
Is the reading time estimate reliable?
It assumes 200 words per minute for reading and 150 for speaking, which are common averages for adult prose. Technical material, dense text and reading in a second language all run slower, so treat the figure as a rough guide rather than a measurement.
Do the counts include spaces?
Both are reported: characters including whitespace and characters excluding it. Words are counted by splitting on whitespace, so a run of several spaces does not inflate the word total.