Word and Character Counter

What does the word counter do, and who is it for?

The tool measures text length in several ways at once: words, visible characters (graphemes), characters without spaces, sentences and paragraphs. It also estimates reading time and predicts how many parts the text would need if it were sent as an SMS.

Writers use it to hit a target length for an article, SEO specialists to check title and description drafts, students to stay within assignment limits, and marketing teams to size SMS and social posts. Everything is calculated in your browser; the text is not uploaded or stored.

How to use it

1. Type or paste text into the box. Results refresh a moment after you stop typing.
2. Pick the analysis language. Turkish applies Turkish rules to letters such as İ and ı, independent of the page language.
3. Set the reading speed between 100 and 400 words per minute. The default of 200 is a reasonable starting point for silent reading.
4. Watch the title (60), description (160) and social post (280) meters while you edit a draft.
5. Copy the summary, download it as JSON, or add your input to a share link if you want to.

To see how a title and description render in search results at pixel level, use the SERP preview tool; to find repeated phrases in the same text, use the keyword density checker.

Words versus graphemes

To a computer, a character is not a single thing. The letter İ can be stored as two Unicode code points (I plus a combining dot), and a family emoji can take seven code points and eleven UTF-16 units. A naive length count therefore gives misleading numbers.

The tool first normalizes text to NFC and then segments it with the browser's Intl.Segmenter. A grapheme is what a reader perceives as one character. A word is a segment the segmenter marks as word-like, so punctuation and emoji are not words. The no-space count excludes Unicode whitespace graphemes. A paragraph is a non-empty block separated by one or more blank lines. Line endings are converted to \n first, and the text is never trimmed.

Reading time formula

Estimated reading time in seconds is ceil(words / speed × 60), rounded up. A 400-word article at 200 words per minute takes 120 seconds, or 2 minutes. Empty text gives zero. Treat it as an estimate: technical prose, tables and code slow readers down.

SMS limits

The SMS estimate follows the GSM-7 basic and extension tables. When every character fits GSM-7, a single message carries 160 septets and each part of a multi-part message carries 153; extension characters such as €, [ or { cost two septets. If the text contains a character outside GSM-7, for example Turkish ş, ğ or ı, the estimate switches to UCS-2: 70 UTF-16 units for one message and 67 per part.

Some carriers use national language tables and may count differently, so the segment number is an estimate. For exact billing, rely on your SMS provider's count.

Turkish and emoji examples

Take the Turkish greeting “Merhaba dünya” (hello world). The tool finds two words; the space between them is one grapheme, so the total is 13 and the no-space count is 12. Add a family emoji and the grapheme count rises by just one while the word count stays the same. Because ü is part of GSM-7, the SMS line still shows a single GSM-7 message.

Limits and common mistakes

• Input is limited to 100,000 Unicode code points; longer text is not cut silently, you get an error instead.
• 60 characters for titles and 160 for descriptions are editorial guides. Google truncates by pixel width and may rewrite titles.
• The 280 meter counts graphemes; X uses its own weighted count in which links and some characters count differently.
• Hyphenated compounds may count as two words, depending on the segmenter.
• In very old browsers without Intl.Segmenter, the tool shows an explanatory notice instead of a wrong count.