Word Counter and Character Counter
Paste or type your text – the character counter instantly shows characters with and without spaces, words, sentences and paragraphs, estimates the reading time and shows how much room is left on X, Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn, in a text message or in a meta description. Example: “Hello, world! How are you?” has 26 characters with spaces, 22 without spaces and 5 words.
Source: X Developer Platform – Counting characters (280, weighting, URLs = 23). Updated: .
How it is calculated
Speaking time, most frequent words and case converter
Speaking time estimates how long the text takes to read aloud at 183 words per minute – the average oral reading rate from the same study as the reading speed (Brysbaert 2019). A free speech or presentation is usually slower, around 130–150 words per minute, so allow some extra time. The table Most frequent words lists the ten words that occur most often with their count and share of all words; upper and lower case are treated alike and nothing is filtered out. The buttons under the text box convert the text to UPPERCASE, lowercase, Sentence case or Title Case; “Undo” restores the text as it was before the last conversion.
The character counter runs entirely in your browser. It counts characters the way people see them: an emoji with a skin tone (👍🏽) or a letter with an accent counts as one character, even if it is technically made of several code points (Unicode text segmentation, UAX #29).
How to count words and characters
- Paste your text (Ctrl+V) or type it straight into the box.
- Read the live count of words, characters with and without spaces, sentences and paragraphs.
- Adjust the reading speed if you like – reading time and the characters left per platform update instantly.
Example: “Hello, world! How are you?” has 26 characters with spaces, 22 without spaces and 5 words. At 200 words per minute, a 1,000-word essay takes 5 minutes to read.
What is counted?
- Characters with spaces: every visible character plus spaces and line breaks.
- Characters without spaces: excluding spaces, tabs and line breaks.
- Words and sentences: based on the word and sentence boundaries of the language; numbers count as words, punctuation does not.
- Paragraphs: blocks of text separated by a blank line.
- Reading time: words ÷ reading speed. The default is 238 words per minute, the average from a meta-analysis of silent reading of non-fiction (Brysbaert 2019); 1,000 words take about 4 minutes 12 seconds.
Character limits by platform
| Platform | Limit | How it counts |
|---|---|---|
| X (Twitter) | 280 | weighted: Latin characters 1, emojis and e.g. Chinese characters 2, every link 23 |
| Instagram (caption) | 2,200 | plus a maximum of 30 hashtags and 20 @ tags |
| TikTok (caption) | 2,200 | per TikTok’s developer docs for posting via the API, counted in UTF-16 units; the app may allow more |
| LinkedIn (post) | 3,000 | characters |
| SMS | 160 / 70 | 160 characters in the GSM alphabet, 70 in Unicode; longer messages are split into parts of 153 or 67 characters |
| Meta description | approx. 160 | guideline only – Google sets no fixed limit and truncates snippets to fit the screen |
Limits checked on 27 September 2026, see sources below; the weighting on X follows the X developer documentation on counting characters. Platforms change their limits from time to time – the counter shown in the app itself always wins.
More text tools: count AI tokens for ChatGPT and other models with the token counter, strip extra spaces with the text cleaner, switch capitalization with the case converter, and preview your title and meta description in Google with the SERP preview.
Frequently asked questions
Do spaces count as characters?
Yes, in “Characters (with spaces)”. The second figure, “without spaces”, leaves out spaces, tabs and line breaks.
How many characters can a post on X have?
Up to 280 – but weighted: emojis and Chinese, Japanese or Korean characters count double and every link counts as 23 characters. The “X (Twitter)” bar counts exactly this way.
Why does my text message suddenly fit only 70 characters?
As soon as one character is outside the GSM alphabet – such as an emoji or curly quotes – the whole SMS is sent as Unicode. Then only 70 characters fit in one message, or 67 per part when it is split.
How long should a meta description be?
Google sets no fixed limit and truncates the snippet depending on screen width. Around 150–160 characters is a common guideline so that the description is usually shown in full.
Is my text stored or sent anywhere?
No. Your text is counted only in your browser, it is not sent to a server and not added to the address bar.
How do I count words in Google Docs?
Press Ctrl+Shift+C (Mac: ⌘+Shift+C) or open Tools → Word count. Or copy the text and paste it here to also see characters without spaces and platform limits.
How do I count words in Microsoft Word?
Word shows the word count in the status bar at the bottom; for details use Review → Word Count. Pasting the text here gives you the same numbers plus reading time.
How long does it take to read 1,000 words?
About 5 minutes at an average reading speed of 200 words per minute. The word counter works this out automatically, and you can change the reading speed.
Sources and legal basis
- X Developer Platform – Counting characters (280, weighting, URLs = 23)
- twitter-text, config/v3.json (weighted Unicode ranges)
- Meta for Developers – Instagram Graph API, IG User Media: caption „Maximum 2200 characters, 30 hashtags, and 20 @ tags“
- TikTok for Developers – Content Posting API, Direct Post: title „maximum length is 2200 in UTF-16 runes“
- LinkedIn Help – „The character limit for a post is 3,000 characters“
- Google Search Central – Control your snippets in search results (no fixed meta description limit)
- 3GPP TS 23.038 – GSM 7-bit default alphabet and extension table
- 3GPP TS 23.040 – SMS: 140 octets of user data, concatenation via User Data Header
- Brysbaert (2019): How many words do we read per minute? Journal of Memory and Language 109 – 238 words per minute
- Unicode Standard Annex #29 – Text Segmentation (grapheme, word and sentence boundaries)
As of: · Editorial policy
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