Count the words and characters in your text

A word is any piece of text with at least one letter or digit, separated from the next one by a space, a line break or a dash. The counter does not look words up in a dictionary, so “e-mail” and “well-known” count as one word each, while “No. 5” counts as two. A lone dash, a list bullet or an emoji is not a word.

A character is anything you can see on the screen: a letter, a digit, a comma, a dash or a space. An emoji takes one character as well, including a flag and a family emoji made of several people. Capital and lowercase letters take one character each, so a headline has the same length in title case and in lowercase. You can switch a text between them with the case converter.

A line break is not a character here. Word 2016, which we checked the counter against, leaves line breaks out in the same way.

Paste your text into the Paste or type text field and the Text statistics panel fills in straight away. The numbers change with every keystroke, so the result is ready before you finish the sentence.

The panel shows six values. The first three are Words, Characters (with spaces) and Characters (without spaces). The other three describe how the text is built: Sentences, Paragraphs and Average sentence length. The word count also tells you how long the text takes to read: the reading time calculator turns it into minutes for silent reading and for reading aloud.

Take the eBay listing title “Men’s Waterproof Winter Down Jacket Black Size L Hooded”. The counter shows 9 words and 55 characters with spaces. Without spaces, 47 characters remain. eBay allows up to 80 characters in a title[1], so this one still has 25 characters of room for a brand name.

Copy text puts the whole text on your clipboard and Clear empties the field. Copying works as soon as the field holds one visible character, even a single emoji. Your browser does all the counting, so the text stays on your device.

Both numbers have their uses, and the gap between them grows with the length of the text. In a blog paragraph we measured, the counter showed 241 characters with spaces and 199 without. The difference reached 42 characters.

Limits on websites and in apps count spaces, because a space takes up as much room in a form field as a letter. Publishers use the same number to estimate the word count of a manuscript: they count every character including spaces and divide by six[2]. Our 241 characters give 40 words by that rule, while the paragraph really has 43.

The count without spaces measures the material itself, for example when you compare two versions of the same text. It stays the same after you remove double spaces or change the line breaks.

It is the number of words that fall on one sentence. A short product description we measured had 22 words in four sentences, which gives 5.5. A blog paragraph came out higher, because its 43 words spread over four sentences give 10.8.

This one number shows how much a reader has to keep in mind before reaching the period. The Flesch Reading Ease formula uses it as one of its two inputs, next to the average number of syllables per word[8].

The Flesch Reading Ease score combines the average sentence length with the average number of syllables per word into one number from 0 to 100. The Flesch Reading Ease score calculator works it out for your text. The Gunning fog index adds the average sentence length to the percentage of words with three or more syllables and turns the sum into years of education.

How easily a text reads also depends on how it looks on the screen. Light gray letters on a white background are hard to read however short the sentences are, and the color contrast checker shows the contrast ratio of your text and background colors with the WCAG levels they meet.

Listing titles have a hard limit. Since July 2026, Amazon has limited product titles in every category except media to 75 characters including spaces[5]. Our jacket title fits with 20 characters to spare.

Titles and descriptions in Google results follow a different rule, because Google cuts them by their width in pixels rather than by the number of characters. The meta title and description length checker measures exactly that.

When you design a layout before the copy is ready, fill the field with placeholder text of a set number of words from the Lorem Ipsum generator and check its length here.

A paragraph is every non-empty line, so one press of Enter makes one paragraph. An empty line added between paragraphs for readability does not raise the count, so two paragraphs separated by a gap still count as two.

A sentence ends with a period (full stop), an exclamation mark, a question mark or an ellipsis when the next sentence starts with a capital letter. The period after common abbreviations such as “Mr.” or “Dr.”, after an initial and inside a web address does not end a sentence. Text without any of these marks counts as one sentence, so the average sentence length works for a product title or a headline too.

A new line that starts with a capital letter starts a new sentence, so a heading above a paragraph counts on its own. A line that starts with a lowercase letter continues the sentence. That is how text pasted from a PDF looks when a line break falls in the middle of a sentence. When most long lines break off without a period, the counter recognizes this kind of wrapping, and only a short line, such as a heading, starts a new sentence.

For ordinary text, our counter and Word 2016 give the same numbers. We checked this by entering the same passages in both. Differences appear with characters that are not words and with some emoji.

Word counts an emoji and a lone “&” between spaces as words, so “A & B” has three words in Word and two in our counter. An ellipsis typed as three spaced dots adds three more words. Word counts “The court . . . concluded” as six words, and our counter as three.

For characters, the difference concerns emoji built from several parts. Word counts a flag as two characters and a family emoji as three, although the screen shows one picture. Our counter shows one character in both cases. Both counters skip a dash surrounded by spaces and a line break in the same way, so for ordinary text the numbers in the Word Count box and in our panel match.