Online Word Counter Tool

 Automatically count how many words, characters, sentences, and paragraphs with our free online word counter. Enter your text below to get started counting words with our online tool!

• WORDS

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• CHARS

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• PARAGRAPHS

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• PAGES

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Clear Text

Our word counter will dynamically count the number of words, characters, sentences, paragraphs, and pages in the text that you submit. It will also show you various other metrics including readability, reading time, and keyword counts included in the text. Install the free Grammarly plugin to get grammar and spellchecking as well.

How to Use Our Word Counter

Using our word counter is really easy. Follow these instructions to get started.

1. Enter the text that you want to count into the textbox above.
2. Our tool will automatically count the number of words and characters in your text.
3. That’s it! Use the word or character count wherever you need.

Note: Text is auto-saved for the next time you return. To clear the text, just click the “Clear Text” link at the bottom.

What Word Count Statistics Do You Show?

We should a variety of statistics. You can see a summary of words, characters, paragraphs, and pages above the main text input box. The remainder of the statistics are on the right sidebar. These include:

• Words: How many total words are in your text.
• Sentences: See the number of sentences in your content.
• Paragraphs: How many paragraphs your content has.
• Characters: We should you the count of total characters with and without spaces. We also have a dedicated character counter tool.
• Pages: We show how many pages your content will take.
• Reading Level: What grade level your content can be read by.
• Reading Time: How long will your content take to read.
• Speaking Time: How long your text will take to speak.
• Keyword Density: How many keywords do you have in your content and how many times do those keywords occur.

Table of Contents

Why Word Count Is Important?

Sometimes you as a writer may be required to write within in a certain word or character limit. College essays are a classic example of where this is the case where students have to write 250-, 500-, or 1000-word essays.

Some people may write more than the expected length of the material, while others fall short of the words. Whether writers have trouble writing too few works or too many, a word counter can help.  So why do you need to worry about word count?

Keeping a strict word count not only benefits writers but the publishers and agents as well. Readers also benefit from word count limits since they can often read more efficiently and aren’t just trying to wade through a list of details. Regardless of what kind of writer you are, you should keep word count in mind as you’re writing.

What Is Word Count?

To understand how to count words, we need to know what a word actually is. A word is made of characters that are separated by punctuation marks or spaces. Emojis count as words in text processors and usually count as two characters since they take up two to four bytes of data. Adding up all the words in a document represents the “word count” and just as adding up all the characters represents the “character count”. Use our dedicated character counter to see character counts.

A word count tool such as ours or Microsoft Word can check how many words a piece of content has.

Teachers or professors sometimes set word count limits for essays or other homework. Sometimes a teacher may assign a page or paragraph limit instead and that limit is easy to translate to word count. A paragraph typically contains around 100 to 200 words while a page typically contains 250 to 500 words depending on whether it’s single or double spaced.

There are a lot of word counter tools online and included within word processors, such as Microsoft Word, but we hope you enjoy ours.

Social Media Word Counts

Various social media channels have word and character limits for the content you post to their sites. Below are the word count limits for various social media platforms.

Twitter Character Count

Twitter allows up to 280 characters in regular Tweets and 10,000 characters in DMs (Direct Messages). The ideal length of a Tweet is 71-100 Characters.

Facebook Post Character Limits

Facebook has very generous character limits of up to 63,206 characters per post. However, the ideal length of a Facebook post is 40-80 characters.

Instagram Character Limits

The limit for an Instagram caption is 2,200 characters, but the ideal length is 138-150 characters. The maximum length of an Instagram bio is 150 characters.

Why Is Word Count Important?

Word count plays several roles for writers from helping them to engage with readers to helping them rank in search engines for content marketing.

Why Readers Care About Word Count?

Word count is an important factor for readers. You need to balance length and detail with the reader’s attention span. Readers may skim a 150 words article, but may not have consumed enough information to understand the content. However, your readers might be bored after reading through a 4,000-word white paper about a topic.

Readers can pay attention for about eight seconds at a time. In this time, some readers may skim while others may read for comprehension. One contributing factor is the reading level of your audience. Detail passages with complex words will be harder for younger, or less educated, readers to comprehend. The Flesch-Kincaid Readability Test cn be used to understand how complex your writing is. Our word counter automatically scores the readability of your writing.

Typical word counts for various documents:

• 0 to 500 words: Ad copy, essays, product descriptions
• 500 to 1,000 words: Blog articles, essays, news articles
• 1,000 to 2,000 words: Short-form news articles, medium-length blog posts, and short pieces of journalism
• 2,000 to 3,000 words: College essays, operating manuals, and longer-form blog posts
• 3,500 to 15,000 words: College dissertations, theses, and in-depth blog posts and journal articles
• 15,000 to 50,000 words: Novels, novellas, and other published books.
• 50,000 to 100,000 words: Novels

Word Count for SEO: How Word Count Helps SEO Rankings

As mentioned earlier, word count is essential for readers, but it’s also important for Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Google and other search engines favor more in-depth articles where writers go into details about whatever topic they’re writing about. Google views these articles as “authoritative.” Word count matters for SEO just as much as for readers.

A study by SERPIQ shows why word count is so important for SEO:

What Word Count Is Sufficient for SEO?

For FAQ articles, a word count of at least 500 words. For reviews and editorial content, we recommend at least 1,500 words.

Search engines are pretty good at identifying “fluff” in articles, so don’t just add a bunch of irrelevant text to an article just to boost its word count for SEO. Instead, focus on writing well-written, in-depth content about your blog topic so that readers stick around. This will not only keep readers on your website but might make them come back again if they can trust the content that you’ve written.

Standard SEO Word and Character Counts

Title tag length

Title tags can be any length, but Google will only show 600px in their search results which is equivalent to about 60 characters. Use our title tag checker to check your length.

Meta description length

Meta descriptions can be any length, but Google meta descriptions tend to be truncated at ~155–160 characters. Keep your meta descriptions to about 50–160 characters to keep it topical and relevant.

FAQs

Is the Word Counter Really Free?

Yes. We are free for users because we are ad-supported.

What Is a Live Word Counter Online?

Our live word counter calculates the number of words, characters, sentences, and more automatically while you type. No buttons or any other user interaction is needed.

Will You See the Number of Characters With and Without the Spaces?

Yes, you will see counts of characters with and without spaces. Just check out the statistics on the right side.

Does the Online Word Counter Check for Plagiarism and Grammar?

Our online word counter works with any browser grammar and plagiarism plugin, such as Grammarly or ProWritingAid, so that you can check for grammar mistakes and plagiarism in real time.

Who Can Use Our Word Counter Tool for Word Counting?

Anyone needing to count words or characters can use our tool. This includes bloggers, social media influencers, content writers, journalists, students, and more.

What Can You Count?

You can count any type of content that has words including: docs, web pages, essays, emails, text documents, and social media posts.

Common Word and Character Counts

• Average Word Length: The average English word is 5 letters long.
• Average Sentence Length: Sentences on average have 15-20 words which means sentences typically have 75-100 letters (without spaces) and 90-120 characters.
• Average Paragraph Length: Paragraphs are typically 5-8 sentences long which means they have on average of 600 characters and 100 words.

Conclusion

Whatever your purpose is when writing – to entertain, to persuade, or to inform – consider the word count of your article. Also, you will have a better chance at ranking in various search engines. So go ahead, count your words with our free word counter above.