Count characters, words, sentences, paragraphs and lines instantly. Check platform limits for Twitter, Instagram, SMS, meta tags and more — all in real time.
This tool measures your text across eight dimensions simultaneously and updates every result in real time as you type or paste: total characters (including spaces and punctuation), characters without spaces, word count, sentence count, paragraph count, line count, estimated reading time, and unique word count. All processing happens entirely in your browser — no text is ever sent to a server, making it completely private regardless of how sensitive your content is. For deeper word-level analysis such as average word length, speaking time and keyword density, try our dedicated Word Counter.
Every major publishing platform enforces character limits that directly affect how your content is displayed and whether it gets truncated. Twitter/X limits posts to 280 characters; SMS messages use 160 characters per segment (longer messages are split, increasing cost); Instagram captions allow up to 2,200 characters but only the first 125 show before the "more" button appears; LinkedIn posts are capped at 3,000 characters; Google meta descriptions display between 155–160 characters before truncation, while page titles should stay under 60 characters. This tool shows a real-time progress bar for each of these limits so you can tell at a glance whether your text fits. For a URL-friendly version of your headline, use our Text to Slug tool.
A character count measures every individual symbol in your text — letters, digits, spaces, punctuation marks and special characters. A word count groups those characters into discrete words separated by whitespace. For academic essays, blog posts and reports, word count is typically the binding constraint. For social media posts, SMS messages, meta tags, ad copy and subject lines, character count is the binding constraint because platforms truncate at a fixed character threshold regardless of word count.
Stop words are extremely common function words — "the", "a", "is", "and", "to", "of" — that appear in almost every piece of text but carry no meaningful information about the topic. The keyword density panel filters these out and shows only the substantive words that characterise your content: nouns, verbs, adjectives and domain-specific terms. This is useful for basic SEO keyword analysis. If unexpected words dominate the list, your copy may need revision. For a more detailed frequency analysis of every word in your text, try our Word Frequency Counter.
The estimated reading time uses 200 words per minute, a widely cited average for general adult reading comprehension. A 1,000-word article shows an estimated reading time of 5 minutes. Actual reading speed varies by reader and content complexity — academic and technical material is typically read at 100–150 words per minute, while simple blog posts may be skimmed at 250–300. For adjustable reading speed settings and a speaking time estimate, use our Reading Time Calculator.
Sentence boundaries are detected at full stops, exclamation marks and question marks followed by a space or end of text. A paragraph is counted as any block of text separated from another by a blank line — the standard definition in both print and web typography. A line is counted as any text separated by a line break, which may differ from paragraph count if you use single line breaks rather than blank-line separators. If your pasted content contains duplicate lines from copying and pasting multiple times, use our Remove Duplicate Lines tool to clean it up first.
Yes. The platform limits panel includes SMS (single segment) at 160 characters. Standard SMS uses GSM-7 encoding, which supports 160 characters per message. If your message contains special characters outside the GSM-7 character set — such as curly quotes, accented letters beyond basic Latin, or symbols — the encoding switches to UCS-2 Unicode, which reduces the single-segment limit to 70 characters. This tool counts raw character length; always test with your SMS provider for Unicode edge cases.
Yes. Once the page has loaded, all counting and analysis happens locally in your browser using JavaScript. You do not need an active internet connection to count characters, check platform limits or analyse keyword density. No data from your text is transmitted anywhere — it never leaves your device. If you need to convert the case of your counted text, our Case Converter also runs entirely in-browser.
Yes. Click the "Download .txt" button in the actions row to save your current text as a plain text file. This is useful when you have pasted, edited and cleaned up content directly in this tool and want to save the result. If you need to encode the content for use in a URL or API call, use our Base64 Encoder / Decoder after finalising your text here.