Count words, characters, sentences & reading time.
The Word Counter tool gives you an instant, accurate count of words, characters, sentences, and paragraphs as you type or paste your text. Whether you are hitting a blog post target, trimming a college essay to meet a limit, or checking a social media caption, this free online word counter updates in real time so you always know exactly where you stand.
Yes. The character count includes spaces by default. A separate 'characters without spaces' count is also displayed so you can use whichever metric your platform or style guide requires.
Any sequence of characters separated by whitespace is treated as one word. Hyphenated compounds like 'well-known' count as one word, and standalone punctuation marks are not counted.
Absolutely. The real-time character counter makes it easy to stay within platform limits. Twitter (X) allows 280 characters per post and LinkedIn captions cap at 3,000 characters for most post types.
There is no hard limit — the tool runs entirely in your browser, so performance depends on your device. In practice it handles documents of tens of thousands of words without issue.