Count Words and Characters

Limits are rarely as clear as they look, and picking the wrong measure is how submissions get rejected. Character limits usually include spaces — a 280-character post and a 2,000-character personal statement both count the gaps — but some forms count only visible characters, so check whether yours states "with spaces". Word counts vary more than people expect between tools, because hyphenated compounds, numbers, and text separated by line breaks rather than spaces all get handled differently. When a hard limit really matters, verify against the destination system rather than trusting any counter, including this one.

The numbers you are checking against tend to be fixed: social posts and ad copy have platform caps, meta descriptions get truncated by search engines somewhere around 155 to 160 characters, SMS messages split at 160, and academic abstracts are often capped at 250 or 300 words. Reading and speaking times use rough rates (about 200 and 130 words per minute); line count follows newlines in your paste. Knowing which constraint you are writing to usually tells you which count to watch.

People count words on things they have not published: manuscripts, applications, legal statements, press releases under embargo. This tool never transmits what you paste — the counting is done in the page and the text is gone when you close the tab.

That is the promise behind every tool here. Files are read in your browser tab, processed there, and discarded when you close it — never uploaded to our servers.