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Word and character limits show up everywhere — a tweet, a meta description, a college application essay, a screenplay page count — and "about how long is this" is surprisingly hard to eyeball accurately. This counter gives you an exact word count, character count (with and without spaces), sentence count, paragraph count, and estimated reading and speaking time, updating instantly as you type.
It's built for writers, students, marketers and anyone else who needs to hit — or stay under — a specific length, without pasting their draft into a word processor just to check a count.
How it works
Paste or type your text into the box. Every stat updates instantly: word count, character count with and without spaces, sentence count, paragraph count, the longest word, and estimated reading time (at an average 238 words per minute) and speaking time (at an average 130 words per minute, roughly conversational pace).
- Paste or type your text into the box.
- Read the live word, character, sentence and paragraph counts.
- Check the estimated reading and speaking time.
- Optionally save the analysis to download as a PDF.
Examples
Checking a meta description length
Google typically displays up to about 155-160 characters of a meta description before truncating it. Pasting a draft description in shows the exact character count so you know whether it will get cut off in search results.
Timing a presentation or speech
A 1,300-word speech at an average speaking pace of 130 words per minute runs about 10 minutes — pasting the script in gives an instant estimate before you rehearse it out loud.
Who should use it
- Checking a social media post or meta description against a character limit.
- Estimating how long a speech or presentation will take to deliver.
- Tracking progress toward an essay or article's target word count.
- Quickly getting a paragraph/sentence count for a formatting requirement.
Industry applications
- Content writing and journalism
- Marketing and SEO
- Academic writing
- Public speaking and presentations
Advantages
- Instant, live stats as you type — no button to click for basic counts.
- Reports sentence and paragraph counts alongside words and characters.
- Includes both reading time and speaking time estimates.
Limitations
- Reading/speaking time are estimates based on averages, not personalized to any individual.
- Sentence detection is a simple punctuation-based heuristic, not full natural-language parsing.
- No readability scoring (like Flesch-Kincaid) — purely counts, not writing-quality analysis.
Common mistakes to avoid
- Assuming character count and byte count are the same — they can differ for text with accented or non-Latin characters.
- Using word count alone to estimate reading time without accounting for how dense or technical the content is.
- Forgetting that platforms often count character limits differently (some count URLs or mentions specially, for example).
Best practices
- Check both word count and character count when a platform's limit isn't clearly specified as one or the other.
- Use the reading time estimate as a rough guide, not an exact figure — actual reading speed varies significantly by reader and content.
- For speeches or presentations, time yourself reading it aloud at least once rather than relying solely on the estimate.
Tips
- If you're close to a platform's character limit, check both with and without spaces — some platforms count differently than you'd expect.
- For a presentation, aim for a slightly lower speaking-time estimate than your allotted time, since pauses and emphasis add real-world time the raw word count won't reflect.