What does this tool count?
Word count, character count (with and without spaces), sentence count, paragraph count, and an estimated reading time — the numbers students, writers, and social media managers check most often when there's a word limit or character cap to hit.
How to use it
- Type directly into the box, or paste text from anywhere.
- All six stats update live — no button to press.
- Reading time is estimated at 200 words per minute, a typical average adult reading speed.
Good to know — common limits
Most character caps people are counting against are platform limits, and they are measured in characters including spaces. The ones that come up most often:
- X / Twitter post: 280 characters on a standard account.
- SMS: 160 characters before the message splits into multiple parts.
- Meta description: around 155–160 characters before search results truncate it.
- Page title: roughly 60 characters before Google cuts it off.
- Instagram caption: 2,200 characters, though only the first line or two show before "more".
One caveat worth knowing: emoji and accented characters can count as more than one character on some platforms, because of how the text is encoded. If you are close to a hard limit, leave a little headroom rather than trusting an exact count.
Worked example
Frequently asked questions
It depends heavily on average word length, but as a rough rule of thumb, 500 characters (including spaces) works out to roughly 80–100 English words. Paste your actual text into the box above for an exact count rather than relying on an estimate.
Reading time is estimated at 200 words per minute, a commonly cited average adult silent-reading speed. It's rounded up to the nearest whole minute, with a minimum of 1 minute shown for any non-empty text, since actual reading speed varies a lot by person and by how technical the text is.
Very close, but not identical in every edge case — this tool splits on whitespace to count words, which matches how most word processors count in typical prose. Numbers, hyphenated words, and unusual punctuation can occasionally be counted slightly differently between tools, so treat small discrepancies as normal rather than a bug.
Sentences are counted by looking for periods, question marks, or exclamation marks followed by a space or the end of the text. Paragraphs are counted as blocks of text separated by a blank line. Both are close approximations of how people naturally write, rather than strict grammatical parsing.
No practical limit — you can paste in anything from a single tweet-length caption to a full essay or article, and the counts update live as you type or paste.
About & privacy
Your text is processed entirely in your browser and is never sent to or stored on our servers — that includes anything you paste in, even drafts you'd rather not share. It's one of Convertly's free, ad-supported tools; see the full privacy policy for details.