Word Counter

How to use it

1. Type or paste your text. Every number updates as you go — nothing to click, nothing to submit.
2. Read the counts. Words and characters lead. Sentences, paragraphs, pages, reading time and speaking time sit alongside them.
3. Set the page assumption. Double spaced gives 250 words a page, single spaced gives 500. Pick the one your assignment or manuscript uses.
4. Check the limits strip. It shows how far you are from the SEO title, meta description, X and Instagram caption limits, live.

What counts as a word

Most counters split your text on spaces and count what falls out. That is quick, and it is wrong often enough to matter.

Splitting on spaces makes wait—stop one word when it is plainly two. It makes end.Start one word after a missing space. And it can turn a double space into a phantom extra word.

This tool matches words instead of gaps. A word is a run of letters or digits, optionally joined by an apostrophe or a hyphen to another run. So:

Characters are counted by code point, not by the storage unit browsers use internally. That sounds like a technicality until you paste an emoji: 😀 is one character here, and two in most counters, because it occupies two units in memory. One is what a person means.

Two character numbers are given. Characters includes spaces, tabs and line breaks. No spaces excludes all of them. Platform limits count spaces, so use the first for those.

How many pages is my word count?

This is the most-asked question about word counts, and almost every tool answers it without telling you what it assumed.

A page has no fixed word count. It depends on the font, the size, the margins and above all the line spacing. The standard academic and manuscript setup — 12pt Times New Roman, 1 inch margins, double spaced — holds about 250 words. Single spaced, the same page holds about 500.

That is a factor of two. A tool that silently picks one is giving half its users the wrong answer, which is why the choice sits in the tool above rather than in a footnote.

Two things shift these numbers. A larger font or wider margins reduce the words per page — Arial 12pt runs slightly fewer words than Times 12pt at the same size, because Times is narrower. And dialogue-heavy fiction fits far fewer words per page than solid prose, because every new speaker starts a new line.

If a submission specifies a page count rather than a word count, ask which spacing it means before you write 4,000 words for a 10-page essay that wanted 2,500.

How long should it be?

Word counts are usually a proxy for “have I written the right amount.” Here is what published work actually runs to.

The number that matters most to a first-time novelist: a debut over 120,000 words is a hard sell. Not impossible, but agents read it as a signal that the manuscript has not been cut. Established authors get more room.

Academic and professional writing has its own conventions:

Reading time and speaking time

Both are shown in the tool. The reading figure uses 238 words per minute, which comes from a 2019 meta-analysis of 190 studies covering 18,573 people — the largest review of adult reading speed available. Fiction runs a little faster at around 260. The often-repeated 300 wpm is not supported by that data.

The speaking figure uses 140 words per minute, the pace that sounds measured from a stage. Conversation runs faster, around 150 to 160.

If you are timing a talk rather than an article, the reading time calculator lets you change the speed and works from a word count directly, without pasting the script.

Character limits worth knowing

The tool shows your distance from each of these live. All figures checked August 2026 — worth saying, because at least one well-known counter still shows Twitter’s 140-character limit, which changed to 280 in 2017.

Worked example

Take a 1,247-word blog post.

• Pages: 5 double spaced, 2.5 single spaced.
• Reading time: 1,247 ÷ 238 = 5.2 minutes, shown as 5 min. The blog convention rounds up to “6 min read”.
• Speaking time: 1,247 ÷ 140 = 8.9 minutes — too long for a 5-minute slot, so about 550 words need cutting.
• Length check: comfortably inside the 1,000–2,500 range that ranking blog posts occupy.

The arithmetic is simple. The value is in having the assumptions stated so you can tell whether the answer applies to you.

Characters to words, and back

People ask this in both directions, usually because a form has a character limit and their draft is measured in words. There’s no exact conversion — it depends entirely on your vocabulary — but the average is stable enough to plan with.

In ordinary English prose a word runs about 4.7 characters, and you need one space after it. So one word ≈ 5.7 characters including the space. That’s the number the table below uses.

Going the other way:

Why your text won’t match the table

The 5.7 figure is an average across ordinary prose. Yours will drift from it, sometimes a lot:

• Technical and academic writing runs longer. “Implementation”, “characteristics”, “methodology” — a page of that can average seven or eight characters a word, so 1,500 characters buys you closer to 200 words than 263.
• Dialogue and casual writing run shorter. Lots of “I”, “it”, “was”, “the”. Five characters a word is common, which pushes 1,500 characters up to about 300 words.
• URLs, code and long names wreck the average outright. One pasted link can be 80 characters and count as a single word.
• Some limits don’t count spaces. Read the field’s own wording. “1,500 characters” and “1,500 characters excluding spaces” differ by roughly 260 words’ worth of spaces at that length.

So use the table to plan and the counter to check. Paste your actual text above and you get the real numbers for it — words, characters with spaces, and characters without — which is the only figure a form will actually accept.

Counting words somewhere else

If your text is not in the box above:

All three word processors count only the selection when text is selected, which is the usual reason a count looks wrong.

A note on what this page does not do

It does not check grammar, score readability, or save your work automatically. Those are separate jobs, and bolting them on is how a counter turns into something you have to configure before it will count.

Your text stays in the browser tab. Nothing is uploaded, nothing is stored, and closing the tab discards it. If you want to keep a copy, copy it out — that is the trade for not having an account.

Pasting from Word or Google Docs sometimes brings invisible formatting characters with it, which can throw off a character count against a strict limit. The invisible character detector will find them. To change capitalisation across a document, the case converter handles it in one click.