Character Counter

About Character counter

The character counter updates live as you type or paste, showing characters with and without spaces, words, sentences, paragraphs and lines. A second tab estimates reading time and lists the ten most frequent keywords. It is built for anyone working to a limit, such as a meta description, a social post, a form field or an essay word count.

How to use it

1. Type or paste your text into the Text to Analyze box; the numbers update immediately.
2. Read the six tiles on the Statistics tab: Characters, Characters (no spaces), Words, Sentences, Paragraphs and Lines.
3. Open the Detailed Analysis tab to see the reading time estimates.
4. Scroll to Keyword Analysis for the ten words you use most often.

When to use it

• Keeping a page description or tweet within its length limit while you edit.
• Checking a school or contest submission against a required word count.
• Estimating how long a speech, blog post or script takes to read.
• Spotting an overused word in a draft by looking at the top keyword list.

Questions about Character counter

How are words counted?

The text is trimmed and split wherever there is whitespace, so anything separated by spaces or line breaks is one word. A hyphenated term such as well-known counts as a single word.

How does it count sentences?

A sentence ends at one or more of . ! or ? followed by a space or the end of the text. Because a space must follow, a decimal like 3.14 or a web address is not counted as an ending.

What reading speeds are used?

Average reading time assumes 225 words per minute and fast reading time assumes 300. Both round up to whole minutes, so even a short note shows as at least one minute.

Why does an emoji count as two characters?

The total is the JavaScript string length, which counts UTF-16 units. Emoji and some symbols take two units, so they add two. Most letters, digits and punctuation add one.

What is left out of the keyword list?

Single-letter words and a built-in list of common English words such as the, and, was and from are skipped, so the results favor topic words. Each word is lowercased before counting.

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