Word & Character Counter

What this tool does

Paste your text to instantly see characters with and without spaces, words, sentences, paragraphs, lines, bytes and reading time. It's handy for essays, assignments and posts with length limits.

The numbers update with every keystroke, so you can trim and polish while watching the count. Set a target length and you'll see how many characters are left — or how far over you are — along with a progress bar.

Your text is counted inside this browser and never sent to a server. When you're done, the 'Copy' button copies the whole text so you can paste it straight into an application form.

When it comes in handy

Application and scholarship essays with limits like '500 words' or '2,000 characters' — draft here first and paste in once you're within the limit, so nothing gets cut off by the form.

School assignments with a minimum or maximum word count.

Checking a blog post isn't too thin, or that a social post fits the platform's character limit, before you publish.

Writing a talk or video script — the reading time gives you a feel for how many minutes it will run.

What each number means

'Characters' counts everything, including spaces and line breaks. 'No spaces' leaves out spaces, tabs and line breaks. Some emoji that are built from several characters may count as two or more even though they look like one.

Words are chunks of text separated by spaces, so 'well-known' counts as one word and 'well known' as two.

Sentences are counted by ending punctuation (. ! ?) or line ends. Paragraphs are blocks separated by a blank line, and lines are counted at every line break, blank lines included.

Reading time is a rough guide for silent reading. Reading aloud — a speech or a voiceover — usually takes longer, so allow extra time for scripts.

How it compares to other options

Microsoft Word shows the word count in the status bar at the bottom, and clicking it opens detailed stats such as characters, paragraphs and lines. If you're already in Word, that's all you need. This tool works in any browser with nothing to open, keeps a running target bar, and also shows byte counts that some forms use.

If the form you're filling in shows its own counter, that's the number that counts in the end. Get close here, paste it in, and compare with the form's figure.

Things to keep in mind

A line break counts as one character. Forms don't all count line breaks the same way, so text with lots of paragraphs may come out a few characters different.

'Bytes (2/CJK)' counts basic Latin letters, digits and symbols as 1 byte and every other character as 2. 'Bytes (UTF-8)' is the actual encoded size. Systems don't all calculate bytes identically, so leave a little headroom.

The draft is saved only in this browser. It won't appear on another device or browser, and it's deleted if you clear site data. Save anything important elsewhere.

There's no spelling or grammar check — just counting.

How to use

1. Paste or type your text.
2. Word, character and sentence counts update as you type.
3. Set a goal to see how much is left.

FAQ

Tips

• The target length is measured in characters including spaces.
• Your draft is kept only in this browser. On a shared computer, click 'Clear' when you're done.
• Byte limits differ between sites — check which of the two byte counts applies.