Online word counter
Whether you are writing an essay, a report or a blog post, or keeping a social post under a limit, an accurate word count matters. This word counter computes words, characters, sentences, paragraphs and estimated reading time as you type, and handles both Latin and CJK text.
What it measures
- Words: whitespace-separated tokens, plus each CJK character as one word.
- Characters: total characters including spaces and punctuation.
- Characters (no spaces): characters with whitespace removed.
- Sentences / paragraphs: estimated from punctuation and line breaks.
- Reading time: an estimate based on typical reading speed.
Where it helps
- Academic writing: meet essay word requirements.
- Content marketing: control SEO article length.
- Social media: stay within character limits.
Do 'words' and 'characters' mean the same thing?
Whether you're hitting a minimum word count on an essay, staying under a social post's cap, or trimming an SEO meta description to around 150-something characters, you need a live, accurate count so you can watch the number as you edit. The trap here: a word count and a character count are not the same thing. English splits into words by spaces, so a sentence has far fewer words than characters. But Chinese and Japanese have no spaces between words, so they're counted by character instead — one Han character, one unit. Before you trust a limit, check whether it's asking for words or characters. It matters most for fields with a hard character cap, like a meta description or a tweet, where watching the wrong number quietly pushes you over.
Why do the three numbers disagree so much on the same content?
Because they are not measuring the same thing, and the gap is widest on a real paragraph. We put a three-sentence English paragraph into this page: 33 words, 169 chars, and 137 chars without spaces — the last two differ by 32 characters, and that gap decides whether it fits a 150-character field. Its Chinese translation, same content, is only 48 chars — less than a third. A "character limit" is therefore a different limit in every language, and the only safe move is to paste the real text in.