Word & Character Counter

Whether you are a novelist, student, SEO copywriter or social media manager — the length of a text almost always matters. Many platforms enforce hard character limits: Twitter/X allows 280 characters per post, LinkedIn posts perform best under 3,000 characters, Instagram captions may be up to 2,200 characters, and Google meta descriptions should not exceed 150–160 characters to avoid truncation in search results. Without a reliable counter, you risk content being cut off or requiring last-minute rewrites at the publishing step.

In academia, word limits are even stricter and carry real consequences. Bachelor's theses, master's dissertations, conference papers and journal submissions carry exact word-count requirements that reviewers and submission systems enforce automatically. Many universities define what counts: does the word limit include footnotes? The bibliography? Abstract? A precise counting tool — one that matches the behaviour of Microsoft Word's word-count function — is as essential as a spell checker. This tool counts words using the same whitespace-splitting logic that mainstream word processors use, so the number you see here will match what your institution's submission system reports.

SEO editors use word counters to hit optimal content lengths for specific keyword clusters and to keep keyword density in check. Research consistently shows that longer, comprehensively written content (1,500–3,000 words for informational queries) tends to rank better because it satisfies user intent more completely. At the same time, keyword density needs to stay natural: 0.5–2.5% is the widely cited safe range, while exceeding 3% risks triggering over-optimisation filters. The built-in keyword density table lets you spot both under-used focus terms and over-repeated words in one glance.

For translators and copy editors, the character count (with and without spaces) is the key billing metric, not word count. German DIN 2960 and the standard practices of many European translation agencies charge per Normzeile (standard line): 55 characters including spaces. The ISO/EN equivalent, used by many agencies, is 1,500 keystrokes including spaces per standard page (Normseite). This counter delivers both character counts — with and without spaces — at a glance, eliminating any ambiguity in client invoicing.

Speakers, trainers and podcasters rely on the speaking-time estimate to match scripts to time slots. At roughly 130 words per minute — a comfortable, clear pace for presentations and lectures — a 1,300-word script fills exactly ten minutes. Faster speakers at 150–160 wpm will finish earlier; slow, deliberate speakers or those with complex technical material may run at 100–110 wpm. The counter shows both reading time (238 wpm, based on Brysbaert et al., 2019) and speaking time (130 wpm) simultaneously, so you always know both figures without switching tools.

1. Enter your text — Paste your text into the input area or type directly. All statistics update in real time — no button required.
2. Read the statistics — At a glance you will see: word count, total characters, characters without spaces, sentence count, paragraph count, estimated reading time, speaking time, and average word length.
3. Review keyword density — Scroll to the Top Keywords table to see the most frequent meaningful words in your text along with their count and density percentage. Common stop words (articles, prepositions, etc.) are filtered out automatically.
4. Save a snippet (Pro) — Pro users can name and save the current text in the browser. This lets you manage multiple text versions and reload them at any time.
5. Export the analysis (Pro) — Click 'Export Analysis' to download all metrics as a .txt file — useful for documentation, agency invoicing or academic reports.

Tip: The counter runs entirely in your browser. Your text never leaves your device — ideal for confidential documents.

Words are counted using a regular expression that splits the text at whitespace boundaries (spaces, tabs and line breaks) and discards empty tokens. A 'word' is any sequence of characters unbroken by whitespace — so numbers ('42'), hyphenated compounds ('e-mail', 'state-of-the-art'), abbreviations ('Dr.', 'etc.') and emoji each count as one word. This matches the behaviour of mainstream word processors such as Microsoft Word and Google Docs, which is why the figure you see here will match what a submission system reports. The character counts are equally precise: 'Characters' includes every character in the text including spaces, tabs and line breaks; 'Characters (no spaces)' strips all whitespace before counting — the metric agencies use for standard-line billing.

Sentence boundaries are detected by punctuation: full stops, exclamation marks and question marks signal a sentence end when followed by a space or line break. Multiple consecutive punctuation marks (?!, …, !!!) are treated as a single sentence end. Abbreviation dots (e.g., Dr., etc., cf.) may occasionally cause a slight overcount because the period is ambiguous — this is a known, unavoidable limitation of rule-based sentence detection shared by most commercial tools, including spaCy and NLTK at their default settings. Paragraph detection is based on double line breaks (or a line break followed by an empty line), consistent with the definition used by word processors.

Reading time is based on the scientifically established average of 238 words per minute for adult silent reading, from the largest meta-analysis to date (Brysbaert, M., 2019, Journal of Memory and Language, vol. 109). This figure represents a typical adult reading moderately complex text; highly technical or mathematical content is typically read at 100–150 wpm. Speaking time uses 130 words per minute — a standard moderate pace for formal presentations, podcast narration and lectures. Keyword density is calculated as a given word's share of all non-stop words in the text, rounded to one decimal place. Stop words (articles, prepositions, conjunctions) are filtered from a built-in list covering common English and German function words.