Word Counter

Almost every piece of writing has a length attached to it: an essay minimum, a 280-character post, a 160-character meta description, a talk that must land inside ten minutes. This counter gives you all of those measurements at once, updating live while you type or edit.

Beyond the basic word total, the sidebar tracks characters with and without spaces, sentences, paragraphs, and an estimate of silent reading time (about 200 words per minute) and speaking time (about 130 words per minute). The input field also shows a running count of unique words, which is handy for spotting repetitive vocabulary in a draft.

A dedicated panel compares your character count against six common caps — X posts, single SMS messages, meta descriptions, title tags, Instagram captions, and LinkedIn posts — with progress bars that turn amber as you approach a limit and red once you pass it. Everything is computed in your browser as you type; the text you paste is not sent to a server, so it is fine to check confidential drafts here.

The counter analyzes your text with a few straightforward rules, applied fresh on every keystroke.

How each statistic is calculated

• Words — the text is trimmed and split on runs of whitespace, so anything separated by spaces, tabs, or line breaks counts as a word.
• Characters — every character is counted, including punctuation, spaces, and line breaks. The second figure strips all whitespace first.
• Sentences — counted by looking for ., !, or ? followed by a space or the end of the text.
• Paragraphs — counted by splitting on line breaks; consecutive blank lines are collapsed, so an empty line between blocks does not create a phantom paragraph.
• Unique words — words are lowercased and matched on letters, digits, apostrophes, and hyphens before being deduplicated.
• Reading and speaking time — the word count divided by 200 or 130 words per minute respectively, rounded and never shown as less than one minute.

The platform bars simply compare the total character count against each cap and change color at 85% and 100%.

Sentence and paragraph detection are heuristic: abbreviations, decimal numbers, and unusual punctuation can nudge those counts up or down. Characters are counted as UTF-16 code units, so some emoji and rare symbols count as two. The unique-word tally matches Latin letters, digits, apostrophes, and hyphens, so accented and non-Latin words may be split inconsistently. Platform caps are the widely published values, but platforms occasionally change their rules and count links or emoji in their own way — always do a final check where you will actually publish.

The counter is a client-side React component. Statistics are recomputed with memoized regular-expression passes on each change: words split on \s+, sentences match terminal punctuation followed by whitespace or end-of-text, and paragraphs split on runs of line breaks. Character totals use the JavaScript string length, which counts UTF-16 code units. Reading time uses 200 words per minute and speaking time 130, each rounded with a one-minute floor. No network requests are made with your text.

Platform limits tracked by the tool

All six bars measure total characters including spaces. Amber indicates you are within 15% of the cap; red means you are over.

Students and academics checking submissions against word limits; content marketers and SEO specialists fitting copy into title tags and meta descriptions; social media managers drafting posts against platform caps; speakers and video creators pacing scripts by speaking time; and authors or bloggers tracking daily output. No technical knowledge is needed — if you can paste text, you can use it.