Word Counter & Character Counter

A word is a run of letters or digits. Contractions and hyphenated words count as one — don't and well-known are one word each — and so do numbers like 3.14. Chinese and Japanese have no spaces between words, so each character counts as one word, the same convention word processors use.

It counts characters as you see them. An emoji with a skin tone, or an accented letter stored as two code points, counts as one character here; some tools count it as two or four. The "no spaces" figure excludes spaces, tabs and line breaks.

Words divided by 238 words a minute, the average silent reading speed for adults in a 2019 meta-analysis of 190 studies. Speaking time uses 140 words a minute. Dense technical text reads slower, and fiction faster.

Flesch reading ease runs from about 0 to 100: higher is easier. 60–70 is plain English that most adults read comfortably. The grade level estimates the US school grade needed. Both are built from sentence length and syllables per word, so they are calibrated for English and shown only once there are at least ten words.

A standard text holds 160 characters from the GSM alphabet. A single character outside it — an emoji, a curly quote, many accented letters — switches the whole message to Unicode, which holds only 70. Long messages are split into parts of 153 or 67 characters, because each part carries a small header.

It is a close guide. X counts every link as 23 characters whatever its length, and counts emoji and Chinese, Japanese or Korean characters as two. For plain text without links it matches; near the 280 limit with links or emoji, check in the X composer.

No. Everything is counted in your browser. Your text is not uploaded, stored or sent anywhere, and closing the tab clears it — so copy it out if you need to keep it.