Word & Character Counter

Words are counted by splitting text on whitespace and punctuation — any sequence of non-whitespace characters separated by spaces, tabs, or newlines counts as one word. Hyphenated words (like 'well-known') count as one word. Numbers and symbols surrounded by spaces each count as one word. Most professional word processors (Microsoft Word, Google Docs) use the same definition.

Reading time uses the average adult silent reading speed of approximately 238 words per minute (based on a 2019 meta-analysis of 190 studies). Some tools use 200 or 250 wpm — the difference is small for most texts. Speaking time uses 130 wpm, the typical conversational pace for presentations.

Sentences are counted by splitting on sentence-ending punctuation: periods, exclamation marks, and question marks. Abbreviations (e.g., Mr., U.S.A.) can cause slight over-counting, but the result is accurate enough for most use cases. Ellipses (...) count as one sentence end.

Keyword density is the percentage of times a specific word or phrase appears relative to the total word count. For SEO, a keyword density of 1–3% is generally considered healthy — too low and the topic signal is weak; too high and it reads as keyword stuffing. This tool shows density for the top 10 most-used words (excluding common stop words like 'the', 'a', 'is').

Twitter/X allows 280 characters per tweet for standard accounts (increased from 140 in 2017). Twitter Blue/X Premium subscribers can post up to 25,000 characters (long-form posts). URLs count as 23 characters regardless of actual length. Mentions (@username) and hashtags count toward the character limit.

Key limits: LinkedIn posts: 3,000 characters (feed), 2,000 characters (comments), 220 characters (headline). Instagram captions: 2,200 characters, but only the first 125 are shown before 'more'. Facebook posts: 63,206 characters. Pinterest descriptions: 500 characters. YouTube descriptions: 5,000 characters. Meta (Instagram/Facebook) ads: 90 characters primary text.