Word and Character Counter
Counts update as you type, and every limit you write against gets its own meter. Your text never leaves this browser tab.
Your text
Live limit meters
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Writing
More numbers
- Speaking time
- 0 sec
- Lines
- 0
- Unique words
- 0
- Avg word length
- 0.0
- Avg sentence
- 0.0 words
- Longest word
- none
Keyword density
Type something and the words you lean on most will show up here.
What the meters are for
Nobody counts words for fun. You count because something has a limit: a caption box that cuts you off, or a professor who said 3,000 words and meant it. Most counters hand you one number and leave the subtraction to you. This one shows how much room is left in the place you are actually writing for.
Star the meters you use and they stay at the top next time. Everything is saved in your own browser, so closing the tab will not lose your draft, and nothing gets sent anywhere.
Where these counts differ from other tools
- X does not count characters. It weights them. A link of any length costs 23, and emoji and Chinese, Japanese or Korean characters cost 2. The X meter here follows the same rules, so a post with a link in it reads the same here as it does in the composer.
- Carriers bill SMS by the segment. Plain text fits 160 characters, and 153 per part once the message splits. One emoji or one curly quote flips the whole message to another encoding and the budget drops to 70. The meter shows which encoding you are in, so you find out here and not on the bill.
- Hyphens do not make new words. State-of-the-art counts as one word, the same way Word and Google Docs count it, so the number you hand in matches the number your reader sees.
- An emoji is one character. Characters are counted as code points, not the storage units behind them, which is what you would say if you were counting by eye.
Leaving citations out of the count
Most word limits are about your writing, not your sources. Flip on Exclude citations and the count leaves out the reference list and the markers inside the text.
- Everything from a References, Bibliography or Works Cited heading to the end
- Bracketed numbers like [1], [2, 4] and [7-9]
- Parentheses with a year in them, like (Smith, 2020) or (Jones et al., 2021)
- Footnote markers, both superscript digits and the Markdown kind
The page shows how many words it left out, so you can check both numbers before you hand anything in.
Common questions
Is my text uploaded anywhere?
No. The counting happens in your browser and the draft is stored in that browser only. There is no account, no upload, and no server that ever sees your text.
Can I count part of a document?
Select any passage in the box and you get the word and character count for just that selection, while the totals stay where they are.
Does it handle other languages?
Yes. Languages written without spaces, like Chinese and Japanese, are split with the browser's own Intl.Segmenter instead of on blanks.
What if my limit is not listed?
Type your number into the box under the meters, pick words or characters, and you get the same meter for it.
Writing something longer? The Markdown to PDF converter turns a draft into a clean file, and the ATS resume scanner checks a resume against the job description before you send it. All of the free tools work the same way: no account, no watermark, nothing stored.