Count words, characters, sentences and paragraphs instantly. Measure reading and speaking time, analyse keyword density, and check social media character limits.
Type or paste your text into the box above and every statistic updates in real time — no button to click, no page to reload. The tool counts words, characters (with and without spaces), sentences, paragraphs, unique words and average word length entirely inside your browser using JavaScript. Your text never leaves your device, making it completely private even for sensitive or confidential content. If character limits are your primary concern rather than word count, our dedicated Character Counter includes real-time platform bars for Twitter, SMS, meta tags and more.
Words are identified using a Unicode-aware word boundary pattern that matches sequences of letters, digits and apostrophes. Hyphenated words such as "well-known" are counted as one word. Numbers, abbreviations and contractions are each counted as one word. Whitespace-only segments between words are ignored. This approach is consistent with how word processors like Microsoft Word count words, making it reliable for academic submission requirements and editorial style guides. For more granular analysis of how often individual words appear, try our Word Frequency Counter which ranks every word by occurrence.
Reading time is estimated at 238 words per minute, which is the average adult silent reading speed based on published research. Speaking time uses 130 words per minute, a comfortable conversational pace commonly used for presentations, podcasts and audiobooks. These two figures serve different purposes: reading time helps you estimate how long a blog post or article will take your audience to read, while speaking time is essential for timing speeches, explainer videos or voice-over scripts. If you need to trim a piece to fit a specific read time, use our Character Counter to track character-level changes simultaneously.
Keyword density measures how often a specific word appears relative to the total word count, expressed as a percentage. For SEO, the general guidance is to aim for your primary target keyword to appear at around 1–2% density — enough to signal relevance to search engines without over-optimising. Common function words like "the", "and" and "a" are filtered out as stop words, so the table shows only substantive terms that actually characterise your content. If your intended keyword ranks very low in the density table, your copy may need to reference that topic more directly. For a URL-friendly version of your main keyword phrase, use our Text to Slug tool.
Platform limits vary considerably: Twitter/X enforces a 280-character post limit; Instagram captions allow up to 2,200 characters but show only the first 125 before the "more" link; LinkedIn posts support up to 3,000 characters; Facebook allows up to 63,206 characters; TikTok bios are capped at 80 characters; and YouTube descriptions allow up to 5,000 characters. For SEO purposes, Google typically displays page titles up to 60 characters and meta descriptions up to 160 characters before truncating. The Social Media Limits panel above colour-codes each platform as green (under 85%), amber (85–100%) or red (over limit) as you type.
Yes. The counter accurately handles any language that separates words with spaces, including French, Spanish, German, Portuguese, Arabic, Hindi and others. For languages that do not use spaces between words — such as Chinese, Japanese and Thai — the word count will not be meaningful, but the character count remains accurate and is the more relevant metric for those writing systems. If you're working with mixed-case text across languages, our Case Converter handles accented characters correctly across most extended Latin scripts.
Yes. Paste your essay into the editor and read the word count from the top panel. Use the character limit selector in the toolbar if your institution specifies a maximum character count. The unique word count and average word length statistics can also help you assess vocabulary variety — a low unique-word ratio relative to total words may indicate repetition that could be revised. For placeholder text while drafting essay structure, our Lorem Ipsum Generator produces standard filler text at any word count you specify.
Minor differences between word counting tools are common and stem from how each application handles edge cases: hyphenated phrases, numeric strings with punctuation, URLs, email addresses and contractions. This tool uses a broad word-boundary regex consistent with most professional word processors, but specialist document software may apply additional rules. If you need an exact match with Microsoft Word's count, paste your final text into Word to verify before submission. You can also clean up extra spaces and line breaks with the "Clean Spaces" button before counting.
If you have pasted text that contains repeated lines — such as copy-pasted data, email threads, or scraped content — use our dedicated Remove Duplicate Lines tool to strip repeats in one click before pasting the cleaned result back here for a final count. You can also use the "Clean Spaces" button in the toolbar above to collapse multiple consecutive spaces into single spaces and trim leading/trailing whitespace, which can affect word counts when excessive whitespace is present.
Convixy offers a complete suite of free text utilities alongside the word counter: