Word and character counter

What this tool is for

It counts words, characters, sentences and reading time as you type, and tells you whether what you have written fits where you are posting it, across eleven platforms. It counts characters the way a reader sees them, which matters in Tamil and Hindi. Your text stays on your device.

Who it's for: anyone writing to a word limit for an assignment or a form; people writing posts that have to fit a platform's limit; and writers checking reading time or looking for their longest sentence.

What gets counted

Type or paste into the box and every number updates as you go. Words are counted the way a reader sees them: runs of letters or digits, so “don’t” is one word and a dash between spaces is none. Characters are counted as you see them on screen, which matters in Tamil, Hindi and other scripts: “கா” is one character to a reader even though it is stored as two codes, and an emoji with a skin tone is one character, not four. You also get characters without spaces, sentences, paragraphs (lines with text on them), and the longest sentence.

You can also open or drop a file: a plain text file (.txt), a Markdown file (.md, with its # and * marks left out of the count), a Word document (.docx) or an OpenDocument text (.odt). The file is read inside your browser, never uploaded. Older .doc files and PDFs can’t be read yet: save them as .docx or .txt first.

Your text is counted in your browser. It is not sent to us or saved, and the share link never holds it.

Reading and speaking time

Reading time assumes 238 words a minute, the average silent reading speed for adults reading non-fiction in English, from Marc Brysbaert’s 2019 review of 190 studies. Speaking time assumes 183 words a minute, the average when reading aloud from the same review. A 1,000-word article takes about 4 minutes 12 seconds to read and 5 minutes 28 seconds to read aloud. Use speaking time to plan a speech, a video script or a radio spot: a 60-second reel holds about 180 words.

Does it fit?

Each place you post has its own limit, and some count differently:

Each place gets a tile with a ring that fills as you type: green while it fits, amber near the limit and red past it, with how much is left or how much to cut. The X tile follows X’s own counting rules from its developer documentation, so a link adds 23 whatever its length. Limits change from time to time, and tools that post for you (schedulers) can allow less than the app itself, so leave a little room.

Write once, post everywhere

The limits range from 300 characters on Bluesky to more than 63,000 on Facebook, so one text rarely fits everywhere. A good habit is to write the shortest version first, for Bluesky or X, and then add detail for Instagram, LinkedIn and Facebook. On the longer networks only the first two or three lines show before “more”, so the first line has to work alone: the offer, the date or the question. The tiles show at a glance which versions still need trimming, and Fits 8 of 10 at the top tells you how close you are.

Is it easy to read?

The Easy to read? card shows the average sentence length, the sentences over 25 words (with the first few quoted, so you can split them) and, for English, the Flesch reading ease score from 0 to 100. A score of 60 to 70 is plain English most adults read easily; below 30 is hard going, like a legal contract. Shorter sentences and shorter words raise it. The score is made for English, so for other languages the card shows sentence length only.

Tidy it up

The Change it step fixes common problems in one press: UPPER, lower, Title Case or Sentence case; removing extra spaces, empty lines or line breaks (handy for text copied from a PDF); and find and replace, which shows how many matches there are before you replace them all. Each change can be undone with Ctrl+Z in the box.

Divya’s Instagram caption

Divya runs the Instagram page for a tuition centre in Kallakurichi. In October 2026 she writes an admission post in Word and pastes it in: 412 words, 2,486 characters. The Instagram bar is red, 286 over. The Most used words card shows “classes” eight times, so she cuts four of them, removes the empty lines and moves the phone number to the first line, where people see it before “more”. Now it is 2,130 characters and fits Instagram, Facebook and LinkedIn. The Bluesky and X tiles are still red, so she writes a separate 240-character line for those.