Word and Character Counter
Paste your text to count words, characters, sentences, and estimated reading time. Nothing leaves your browser.
What each number counts
Words are counted by splitting on whitespace, so a hyphenated compound counts as one word. Characters are counted with spaces included, and the second figure repeats that count without them, which is what most platform limits actually measure. Sentences are counted by terminal punctuation. Reading time assumes 200 words per minute, a common average for adult silent reading, and rounds to whole minutes.
reading time = words / 200 words per minute
Length limits worth knowing
| Where | Practical limit |
|---|---|
| Google title tag | about 60 characters |
| Meta description | 70 to 160 characters |
| Post on X | 280 characters |
| Email subject line | about 40 characters on mobile |
| One SMS segment | 160 characters |
The title and description limits are the ones this site enforces on its own pages. Google truncates titles on pixel width rather than character count, so 60 is a practical ceiling rather than a hard cut.
When this is worth running
Checking a draft against a brief before you hand it over, since most briefs specify a word count and most drafts overshoot it. Fitting copy into a hard limit, where the count without spaces is the figure the platform is applying. And estimating reading time for an article page, which is worth displaying because it sets expectations before someone commits to scrolling.
Where the number will mislead you
Word count is a proxy for effort, not for quality and not for ranking. Google publishes no minimum length, and a 700 word page that answers the question completely will beat a 2,500 word page that circles it. Use the count to check you have stayed inside a brief, not to decide whether a piece is finished. Reading time is rough in the same way: 200 words per minute is an average over easy prose, and dense technical writing with code or tables runs a lot slower.
Questions people ask about word count
Does article length affect rankings?
- Not directly. Longer pages often correlate with better rankings because thorough answers tend to run long, but the length is not the cause. Padding a page to hit a number adds words without adding the coverage that produced the correlation in the first place.
Should I count characters with or without spaces?
- Without spaces for most platform limits, which is why both figures are shown. When you are unsure, check against the stricter of the two so a truncation cannot surprise you.
Is the text I paste sent anywhere?
- No. The counting runs entirely in your browser and nothing is uploaded, which is why the tool keeps working with the network disconnected.
Other free tools
Why SEOryon
Free tools are the start. SEOryon does the whole job.
These tools give you a quick answer. SEOryon runs the full loop for you every week: it finds what you should write using real search data, then writes the content that ranks in Google and gets cited in AI answers.
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Built to rank and get cited
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You stay in control
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