Word Counter — Count Words & Characters Instantly

Words are counted as sequences of non-whitespace characters separated by spaces, tabs, or line breaks. Hyphenated words like "state-of-the-art" count as one word. Numbers, email addresses, and URLs each count as one word. Punctuation attached to words (like "hello,") is stripped before counting so it does not affect the total.

Character count with spaces counts every character including spaces — this matches what most word processors (Microsoft Word, Google Docs) show. Character count without spaces is useful for social media platforms, advertising systems, and some publishing platforms that measure text length by non-space characters only. Twitter, for example, counts every character including spaces in its 280-character limit.

Common target word counts: tweet or X post (up to 280 characters), Instagram caption (up to 2,200 characters, best under 150), LinkedIn post (up to 3,000 characters), blog post (typically 1,500–2,500 words for SEO), news article (300–800 words), short story (1,000–7,500 words), novella (17,500–40,000 words), novel (80,000–100,000 words). SEO meta descriptions should be 150–160 characters.

Reading time is estimated based on an average adult reading speed of 200–250 words per minute for online content. This is slower than the often-cited 250–300 wpm because online reading includes scanning and re-reading. For technical content, allow more time — developers read code-heavy articles more slowly. The estimate rounds to the nearest minute.

Yes — the counter works with any language that uses spaces between words, including French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, and most European languages. For languages without spaces between words (Chinese, Japanese, Thai), the character count is more meaningful than the word count, since word boundaries are not marked by spaces.