🔤 Word & Character Counter

What this tool counts

• Words — any run of characters separated by spaces or line breaks.
• Characters — everything, including spaces, punctuation and line breaks.
• Characters without spaces — the count many forms and job applications ask for.
• Sentences — text segments ending in a full stop, question mark, exclamation mark, or a line break.
• Paragraphs — blocks of text separated by line breaks.
• Unique words — how many distinct words you used, ignoring case and punctuation. A useful signal of repetitiveness.
• Reading time — based on 238 words per minute, the average for adults reading English prose silently.
• Speaking time — based on 140 words per minute, a comfortable presentation pace.

Word limits worth remembering

• Meta description — around 155 characters before Google truncates it.
• Title tag — around 60 characters.
• X / Twitter post — 280 characters on a free account.
• LinkedIn post — 3,000 characters, but only about 210 show before "see more".
• Instagram caption — 2,200 characters.
• Blog post that ranks well — commonly 1,200–2,000 words, though usefulness matters far more than length.
• UCAS personal statement — 4,000 characters or 47 lines.

About keyword density

The keyword panel shows your most frequent meaningful words, ignoring common filler words such as "the" and "and". It is a quick way to check that a piece of writing is actually about what you think it is about.

A word of caution: deliberately pushing a keyword to a target percentage is an outdated tactic that modern search engines treat as spam. Use this as a sanity check, not a target. If one word dominates unnaturally, that is worth fixing — not because of a percentage, but because it reads badly.

Why counts differ between tools

Different programs use different rules. A hyphenated term like "state-of-the-art" might count as one word here and four somewhere else. Microsoft Word counts some things differently again. If you have a hard limit to meet, check with the exact tool your reader will use.