ToolzWord & Character Counter
Count words, characters, sentences and reading time.
0
Words
0
Characters
0
Without spaces
0
Sentences
0
Paragraphs
—
Reading time
How each number is counted
A word is any run of characters separated by whitespace, so hyphenated compounds count as one and an em dash surrounded by spaces counts as none. Characters include spaces and line breaks — the second figure strips all whitespace, which is the number that matters for fields with a hard character budget. Sentences are split on ., ! and ?, and paragraphs on blank lines.
The limits worth knowing
Meta descriptions are truncated by Google at roughly 155–160 characters and title tags at around 60. Bluesky allows 300 characters, X 280 on a free account. SMS messages split after 160 GSM-7 characters, or 70 if the text contains an emoji or an accent that forces UCS-2 encoding. Because those platforms count characters rather than words, the “without spaces” figure is usually not the one to check against — use the plain character count.
Reading time is an estimate, not a measurement
The figure here assumes 200 words per minute, a common average for adults reading prose on screen. Technical documentation, anything with code samples, or text in a second language runs considerably slower; skimmed listicles run faster. Treat it as the rough label you would put on an article, not as a promise.
Abbreviations skew the sentence count
Splitting on punctuation cannot tell a full stop from an abbreviation, so “approx. 3.5 kg” registers as two sentences rather than one. Decimal points are safe — a full stop only counts as an ending when whitespace or the end of the text follows it, which keeps “3.5” in one piece. For ordinary prose the count is close enough to be useful; for text dense with abbreviations, expect it to read high.