What this does
Type or paste into the box and six figures update on every keystroke: words, characters, characters excluding whitespace, sentences, paragraphs and reading time. Under them sits a row of length limits — tweet 280, SMS 160, meta description 160, page title 60 — each showing your character count against the cap and turning red once you pass it. There is no Count button; the arithmetic happens in the page as you type, so drafts stay on your machine.
What counts as a word?
Anything separated by whitespace. The text is trimmed and split on runs of
spaces, tabs and newlines, so consecutive spaces do not inflate the number and
a leading indent does not add one. A hyphenated compound
(state-of-the-art) is one word, a contraction (don't)
is one word, and a standalone symbol surrounded by spaces counts as a word of
its own. It also means the count is not meaningful for languages that do not
put spaces between words — a paragraph of Chinese registers as a single word.
Word processors use slightly different rules, so expect a small difference
against Word or Docs on the same text.
How is reading time calculated?
Words divided by 225 words per minute — a standard figure for silent reading of ordinary prose — rounded to the nearest second. Below a minute it shows seconds; above, minutes and seconds, with the seconds dropped when they land on zero.
10 words → 3s
300 words → 1m 20s
450 words → 2mIt is a reading estimate, not a speaking one. For a talk or a voiceover, 130–150 words per minute is closer — roughly halve what this shows.
Do emoji count as one character?
Not always. Characters are counted as UTF-16 code units, which is what JavaScript and most APIs mean by "length". Ordinary text counts as you would expect, but an emoji outside the basic plane counts as 2, and a composed one — a flag, a skin-toned or family emoji — counts as the sum of its parts, which can be 7 or more. The "no spaces" figure is the same count with every space, tab and newline removed.
How does it decide where sentences and paragraphs end?
A sentence is a run of text ending in one or more of . ! ?
followed by whitespace or the end of the input, plus a final unterminated
fragment if there is one. Because the terminator must be followed by a space, a
decimal like $3.50 does not split a sentence — but an abbreviation
does, so "Mr. Smith arrived." counts as two. A paragraph is a block separated
by a blank line; hard-wrapped text with single newlines counts as one.
Are the tweet and SMS limits exact?
Treat them as guides. All four compare the plain character count, spaces included, against a fixed cap. X/Twitter weights characters — CJK counts double and any URL counts as 23 regardless of length — so a post of Latin prose matches the badge while one full of links will not. SMS is 160 characters only while the message stays in the GSM-7 alphabet; one emoji or curly quote switches the encoding and drops the limit to 70 per part. The 60-character title figure is Google's practical truncation width, which is really a pixel measurement. For related work on the same text, see the case converter, the slug generator, and the LLM token counter if you need cost rather than length.