Word Counter

Students, writers and job seekers meet word limits everywhere: a 250 word college essay, a 500 word statement of purpose, a 150 character bio or a 2,000 word assignment. The counter follows the same rule as Microsoft Word and Google Docs. A word is a run of letters or digits between spaces, so don't, e-mail, COVID-19 and 2,500 each count as one, while a dash or bullet standing alone is not a word. That means the number here matches what your teacher or the form will see.

Characters are counted two ways, because forms differ. Characters counts every letter, digit, space and punctuation mark on the lines, which is what most character limits mean. Without spaces leaves out every space, tab and line break, which some translation and typing jobs use. Line breaks are not counted as characters, again as Word does.

Hindi, Marathi and other Indic scripts need care. A syllable such as कि is written with two Unicode characters, क and the vowel sign ि, so Word counts it as 2. LibreOffice and most people count what they see, which is 1. When your text has Devanagari or another Indic script, the result shows both numbers, labelled Characters and Letters as you see them, so you can use whichever your form expects. Words are counted the same way in every script, and Chinese and Japanese text counts each character as a word, as Word does.

Posting online has its own limits. X allows 280 characters but counts every link as 23, and each emoji and each Chinese, Japanese or Korean character as 2, so the page works out the X count with those rules. Hindi and other Indian scripts count 1 a character on X. Instagram captions can be 2,200 characters, LinkedIn posts 3,000, YouTube titles 100 and descriptions 5,000. Each line shows how many characters are used and how many are left or over.

SMS messages are split into parts. Plain English text using the GSM alphabet fits 160 characters in one message, or 153 per part when it is split. One Hindi letter, emoji or ₹ sign switches the whole message to Unicode, which fits only 70, or 67 per part. The counter tells you which one your text uses and how many parts it will take, which matters for bulk SMS costs.

Reading time uses 238 words a minute, the average silent reading speed for adult non-fiction found by a 2019 review of 190 studies. Speaking time uses 140 words a minute, our own figure for a steady talk or speech, so a 5 minute speech is about 700 words. The keyword list shows the words you use most and their share of all words, leaving out common words such as the, and or is, plus any two word phrase you repeat. Turn off the common words option to see every word.

Your text and files stay in your browser tab. TaskNinja does not receive, save or log them, there is no sign-in, and the counter keeps working if your connection drops after the page loads. Word, PDF, OpenDocument and RTF files are opened by code running on your own device. We only count anonymous events, such as the counter being used, never the words you type.

Long texts are counted in a background thread of the browser, so typing stays smooth even for a whole book. Nothing is kept after you close the tab.