Word Counter

The Word Counter tallies words, characters (with and without spaces), sentences, and paragraphs in your text in real time — updating live as you type or paste. It's built for essayists hitting strict length limits, students filling in exam word counts, marketers writing to platform character caps, editors tightening drafts, and anyone else who needs precise length feedback without opening a full word processor. Every field has a length that matters. Twitter/X posts cap at 280 characters. LinkedIn headline: 220. Facebook ad primary text: 125 characters (visible without "See more"). Google Ads headline: 30 characters. Meta description: 150–160 characters. Instagram caption: 2,200 characters (but only the first 125 show before "more"). SMS: 160 characters per segment. Elevator-pitch bios: usually 50–150 words. UCAS personal statements: 4,000 characters or 47 lines. IELTS Task 2 essays: minimum 250 words. Most Indian board exams: 250–350 words for long-answer questions. Blog posts for SEO: 800–2,500 words depending on the topic. The counter treats whitespace-separated groups as words, matching the convention Microsoft Word and Google Docs use. Punctuation counts toward characters but not words, so "Hello, world!" is 2 words and 13 characters. Sentence count uses common terminators (. ! ?) and correctly handles multiple punctuation marks. Paragraph count uses blank lines as delimiters, which is what most people intuitively mean by "paragraphs" in web copy. Beyond hitting limits, use word count as a discipline tool. Cutting a first draft by 20–30% almost always makes it stronger: unnecessary qualifiers ("very", "quite", "really"), redundant phrases ("in order to", "at this point in time"), and passive voice constructions ("was seen to be") all show up as easy targets. Set a target word count, write freely, then use the counter as your rewrite metric — aim for 90% of the meaning in 70% of the words. The tool also breaks down average sentence length, which is a great readability check. Under 15 words per sentence on average is generally clear web copy. Over 25 words average signals a text that will feel dense and academic — usually not what you want for a landing page, ad, or email. Vary sentence length deliberately: short sentences (5–10 words) hit hard, medium sentences (15–20) carry information, and occasional long sentences (30+) develop ideas. Everything runs entirely in your browser. Your text is never transmitted, saved, or logged, which makes the tool safe for pre-publication client work, unpublished manuscripts, and confidential drafts. Combine it with the Character Counter for pure-character limits, the SEO Word Counter for content strategy, and the Case Converter to normalise formatting in imported drafts.