Word Counter
Count words, characters, sentences and reading time as you type, remove duplicate lines, and generate Lorem ipsum.
Word Counter - Words, Characters, Sentences and Reading Time
Type or paste your text and every count updates as you go: words, characters with and without spaces, sentences, paragraphs and lines, plus how long the text takes to read and to say out loud. Length badges show at a glance whether it fits a post on X, a page title, a meta description or an SMS. Two more tabs clean up a list by removing duplicate lines and produce Lorem ipsum placeholder text.
Everything is counted in your browser, so an essay, a contract clause or a draft post never leaves your device.
How to use it
- Paste or type your text in the Count tab.
- Read the totals under the text; they change with every keystroke.
- Check the length badges, which turn red when a limit is exceeded.
- Open Remove duplicate lines or Lorem ipsum for the other two jobs.
What is counted, and how
| Count | How it works |
|---|---|
| Words | Your browser's own word segmentation, which follows Unicode rules and also splits Japanese and Chinese text into words. Numbers count; punctuation does not. |
| Characters | Every visible character, spaces and line breaks included. An emoji or an accented letter counts once, even when it is stored as several code points. |
| Characters without spaces | The same, leaving out spaces, tabs and line breaks. |
| Sentences | Text ending in . ! or ?, including the Japanese and Arabic forms of those marks. |
| Paragraphs | Blocks of text separated by an empty line. |
| Reading time | Words divided by 238 per minute, the average silent reading speed for non-fiction in English. |
| Speaking time | Words divided by 140 per minute, a typical pace for a presentation. |
The reading speed comes from a 2019 review of 190 studies, which found adults read English non-fiction at about 238 words per minute. It is an average: technical text is slower, light fiction faster.
Length limits worth knowing
| Where | Limit |
|---|---|
| A post on X (standard account) | 280 characters |
| Page title in search results | About 60 characters before it is cut off |
| Meta description in search results | About 155 to 160 characters |
| A single SMS | 160 characters in the basic alphabet, 70 with emoji or non-Latin letters |
Search engines cut titles and descriptions by pixel width rather than a fixed character count, so treat 60 and 160 as guides. An SMS longer than one message is split and joined again on the phone, and is usually billed per part.
Most frequent words
Below the totals, the ten most frequent words of three letters or more are listed with their count and share of all words. It is a quick way to spot a word you repeat too often, or to check that a page actually mentions the term it is supposed to be about.
Removing duplicate lines
Paste a list into Remove duplicate lines and each line is kept only the first time it appears, in its original order. Tick Ignore case to treat Apple and apple as the same, Trim spaces to ignore spaces at the ends of lines, and Remove empty lines to drop blanks. Sort puts the result in alphabetical order, with numbers compared as numbers, so item 2 comes before item 10. A line under the result says how many duplicates and empty lines were removed.
Lorem ipsum placeholder text
Lorem ipsum is scrambled Latin, taken from a passage by Cicero, and has been the standard filler text of typesetting and design for decades. It looks like real text without distracting anyone with its meaning. Choose the number of Paragraphs and their Length, keep or drop the traditional opening line, and tick Wrap in <p> tags to paste it straight into HTML.
Related tools
To change text to UPPER CASE, Title Case or a URL slug, use the Case Converter. To compare two versions of a text, use Text Compare. The task pages open this tool on one job: character counter, remove duplicate lines and Lorem ipsum generator. To count the words of a PDF, extract its text first with PDF to text.