Paste or type your text below to instantly count words, characters, sentences, paragraphs, and estimate reading time. Check character limits for social media platforms.
Character Limits
Type or paste text to see keyword density
The Word Counter & Character Counter is a free tool that instantly analyzes your text. Whether you're writing a tweet, blog post, essay, or meta description, this tool gives you real-time counts for words, characters (with and without spaces), sentences, paragraphs, and lines. It also estimates reading time (at 238 words/minute) and speaking time (at 150 words/minute).
Every social media platform and search engine has specific character limits. Our word counter tracks your text against these limits in real-time so you never exceed them:
Meet word count requirements for school essays, college applications, and academic papers. Track your progress in real-time.
Optimize blog posts and meta descriptions to ideal lengths. Check keyword density to avoid over-optimization.
Stay within character limits for Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, and other platforms without guessing.
Estimate how long your content takes to read or present. Perfect for speech preparation and presentations.
Words are counted by splitting text on whitespace (spaces, tabs, newlines). Consecutive whitespace is treated as a single separator. Hyphenated words like "well-known" count as one word, matching Microsoft Word's counting method.
"Characters" counts every character including spaces, punctuation, and special characters. "Characters without spaces" excludes all space characters but keeps everything else. Most social media limits use total characters (with spaces).
Reading time is calculated at 238 words per minute, which is the average adult reading speed based on research. Speaking time uses 150 words per minute, the average comfortable speaking pace for presentations.
Keyword density shows how often each word appears as a percentage of total words. We exclude common stop words (the, is, at, a, an, etc.) and show the top 10 most frequent meaningful words. For SEO, keyword density of 1-3% is generally recommended.
Studies show that top-ranking blog posts average 1,500-2,500 words. However, quality matters more than quantity. Long-form content (2,000+ words) tends to rank better because it provides comprehensive coverage of a topic, earning more backlinks and longer dwell time.