Character Counter & Word Counter: Count words and characters online

Type, paste text or open a text file up to 2 MB, and the tool counts as you go: characters with and without spaces, words, sentences, paragraphs, lines, letters and size in bytes. It also shows reading and speaking time, checks limits for 13 destinations and lists the most frequent terms. Everything runs in your browser, for free and without signing in.

“Characters” includes everything, even spaces, tabs and line breaks. This is the number meant by “keystrokes” or “characters with spaces”. “Characters without spaces” excludes that whitespace. “Letters” counts only letters, not digits, punctuation or emojis. “Hallo Welt” has 10 characters and 9 characters without spaces. An emoji, a flag or an “é” made up of two Unicode characters each counts as 1 character. The applicable count is usually specified in the requirements for assignments, applications or translations.

In Microsoft Word, the word count appears at the bottom left of the status bar. Click it to open the “Word Count” window, which you can also access via “Review”. It shows characters with and without spaces too. In Google Docs, find the word count under “Tools” or press Ctrl + Shift + C. If you don't have either program, simply paste your text into this tool. Counts may differ slightly because each program handles hyphens and special characters differently. This tool's rules are in the “Counting rules” section.

As a rule of thumb, divide the character count by the average word length plus 1 for the space. With words averaging 5 to 6 letters, 1,000 characters make about 140 to 170 words and 2,500 characters about 350 to 420 words. The longer the words of a language or a technical text, the fewer words you get. The tool above shows the exact count for your text.

A standard page (German “Normseite”) has 1,800 keystrokes, i.e. 1,800 characters with spaces in 30 lines of 60 characters each. Publishers, translators and editors often calculate with it. The tool does not count pages: divide the “Characters” value by 1,800 to get the number of standard pages. For example, 9,000 characters are 5 standard pages.

At 200 words per minute, reading 500 words silently takes 2 min 30 s. At 130 words per minute, speaking them takes 3 min 51 s. The tool calculates both for your text and displays reading and speaking times live. Both are estimates; technical texts take longer to read.

An SMS can hold 160 characters if the text uses only the GSM-7 alphabet, which includes German umlauts and “ß”. Characters such as “€”, “[” and “{” count twice. If it contains an emoji or a character such as “á”, “ç” or “ł”, the limit drops to 70. Longer texts are split into parts of 153 or 67 characters, with each part charged as a separate SMS. So 161 characters make 2 SMS messages.

280. Each link counts as 23 characters, regardless of its length, and each emoji or Chinese, Japanese or Korean character counts as 2. A post with 270 characters of text, one link and one emoji therefore counts as 270 + 23 + 2 = 295—15 too many. The tool does not recognize links without “http://” or “https://” as links.

No. All numbers are calculated in your browser: no upload, logging, or storage. Files you open are read only locally. You can check this in the developer tools' Network tab: typing generates no requests.