Word & character counter

Live counts as you type, plus reading and speaking time and seven case conversions. Your text stays in this tab.

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Words
0
Characters
0
Without spaces
0
Sentences
0
Paragraphs
0
Reading time
0 min
Speaking time
0 min

Why the numbers differ between tools

Paste the same paragraph into three word counters and you can easily get three answers. The disagreements come from a handful of edge cases:

  • Hyphenated words. “State-of-the-art” is one word here, as in most word processors. Some tools split on hyphens and call it four.
  • Numbers and symbols. “$1,200” is one word here. Some tools discard it entirely.
  • Em dashes without spaces. “yes—no” is one token by whitespace rules, two by most human judgement.
  • Trailing whitespace and empty lines. Handled inconsistently almost everywhere.

If you are writing to a hard limit that someone else will check, find out which tool they use. For a university essay that is usually Microsoft Word, whose count this one matches closely for ordinary prose.

The case conversions

Conversion “hello world example” becomes
UPPER HELLO WORLD EXAMPLE
lower hello world example
Title Case Hello World Example
Sentence case Hello world example
camelCase helloWorldExample
snake_case hello_world_example
kebab-case hello-world-example

The last three are for developers: variable names, database columns and URL slugs respectively. Title Case here capitalises every word, which is the simple rule — proper editorial title case keeps short prepositions and articles lowercase, and no algorithm gets that right without a dictionary.

Common limits worth knowing

Where Limit
X / Twitter post 280 characters
SMS, single message 160 characters (70 with emoji or non-Latin script)
Meta description ~155 characters before truncation
Page title in search results ~60 characters
LinkedIn headline 220 characters
UCAS personal statement 4,000 characters or 47 lines

Privacy, briefly

This is a text box on a page. There is no autosave, no analytics on what you type, no draft synchronisation, and nothing leaves your browser. That is worth saying because a surprising number of free writing tools quietly post every keystroke to a server for “grammar suggestions”, and people paste some very sensitive text into word counters.

How it works

  1. 01Paste or typeThe counts update on every keystroke.
  2. 02Read the numbersWords, characters with and without spaces, sentences, paragraphs, reading time and speaking time.
  3. 03Convert case if you need toUPPER, lower, Title, Sentence, camelCase, snake_case and kebab-case.
  4. 04Copy or saveCopy back to the clipboard, or download as a .txt file.

Questions people actually ask

How is a word counted?
Any run of non-whitespace characters separated by whitespace. This matches how word processors count and how most editorial word limits are understood. Hyphenated compounds count as one word; "up-to-date" is one, not three.
How is reading time calculated?
At 225 words per minute, which is a common estimate for adult silent reading of general prose. Speaking time uses 130 words per minute, roughly a measured presentation pace. Both are rounded up to at least one minute. Treat them as estimates, not measurements — reading speed varies enormously with material and reader.
Does character count include spaces?
Both numbers are shown. Character limits on forms and social platforms almost always include spaces; academic word limits usually do not count characters at all.
Is my text sent anywhere?
No. Everything runs in this page. There is no autosave, no draft sync and no server — which also means closing the tab loses your text, so keep the original elsewhere.
What is sentence case doing exactly?
Lowercasing everything, then capitalising the first letter of the text and the first letter after each sentence-ending punctuation mark. It will not know that "iPhone" or a person’s name should stay capitalised — check the result.