Count words and characters

Because there's no agreed definition of a word, and every tool draws the line somewhere slightly different. Hyphenated words, contractions, numbers, em rules and URLs are all judgement calls, and reasonable tools disagree on all of them.

Here, a word is a run of characters separated by whitespace. So well-known is one, don't is one, 2026 is one, and a URL is one however long it runs.

Word counts differing by one or two percent between tools is normal. Differing by ten percent usually means one of them is counting something odd, like treating each part of a hyphenated word separately.

When the exact number matters

For an assignment with a stated limit, use whatever the marker will use. That's almost always Word, and Word counts the way this does with one notable exception: it counts a number with a space in it, like 10 000, as two words.

For a journal or a publisher, the guidelines usually say whether footnotes, captions, the abstract and the bibliography are included. That distinction moves the number far more than any counting rule, and it's the one people get wrong.

For anything with a hard limit, leave yourself a margin. Being three words over because of a definition disagreement is a bad way to fail a requirement.

Characters, with and without spaces

Both are shown because both get asked for.

Character limits on forms almost always include spaces, since they're limiting storage. A 500 character limit means 500 including spaces.

Typographic and design contexts often quote the count without spaces. Print and publishing conventions vary.

If a form rejects text that looks short enough, the usual culprit is line breaks counting as characters, or a paste that brought invisible formatting characters with it.

Reading time

Based on 200 to 250 words a minute, which is the ordinary range for an adult reading prose on a screen for comprehension.

It's a rough figure and it should be treated as one. Dense technical writing is read far slower. A list is scanned rather than read. Somebody skimming for one fact isn't reading at all.

Speaking is slower than reading. A comfortable presentation pace is around 130 to 150 words a minute, so a five minute talk is roughly 700 words. That's the number to use for a speech, not the reading time.

Sentences and paragraphs

Sentences are counted by terminal punctuation, which means abbreviations inflate the number. Dr. Smith arrived at 9 a.m. counts as three sentences by most methods, including this one. It's a known limitation of counting this way and every tool that doesn't parse grammar shares it.

Paragraphs are separated by blank lines. Text pasted from a PDF often arrives with a line break at the end of every visual line, which turns one paragraph into twenty. Stripping the empty lines first gives a sensible count.

Counting for a specific purpose

• Meta description: aim for 150 to 160 characters. Google truncates around there, and it truncates by pixel width rather than character count, so capital letters and wide characters cost more.
• Page title: 50 to 60 characters.
• A post on X: 280 characters, and a link counts as a fixed 23 no matter how long it is.
• SMS: 160 characters for plain text. One non-Latin character switches the whole message to a different encoding and drops the limit to 70.

That last one surprises people. A single emoji in an otherwise plain text message more than halves how much fits in one message.

Nothing is sent anywhere

The counting happens as you type, in your browser. Nothing is uploaded and nothing is stored, which matters given how often the text being counted is a cover letter, an application or a draft nobody else has seen yet.