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CALCPARK

Character and Word Counter

Count characters with and without spaces, words, sentences and paragraphs as you type, plus reading time, keyword density and limits for X, Instagram and SMS.

Runs on your device
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How to use it

  1. Type or paste the text. Words, characters, sentences, paragraphs, lines and unique words update on every keystroke.
  2. Check reading and speaking time; change the words-per-minute values if your audience reads or you speak faster or slower.
  3. Watch the platform meters: a bar turns amber above 90% of the limit and red when the text is too long.
  4. Use keyword density to spot over-used words; untick “Hide common words” to include stop words like “the”.
  5. “Copy statistics” puts the key numbers on your clipboard; “Remove extra spaces” collapses double spaces and blank lines.

Example

The text “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog. The dog sleeps.” followed by a blank line and “It is a well-known sentence.” gives 17 words, 90 characters(73 without spaces), 3 sentences, 2 paragraphs and 14 unique words (“the” appears three times, “dog” twice). At 238 wpm that is under 30 seconds of reading; the longest word is “well-known”. In the keyword list “dog” ranks first with 2 of the 10 counted words (20%) once stop words are hidden.

How the counts are made

Characters are counted per Unicode code point (Array.from(text).length), so “é” is one character whether it was typed as one key or as e + combining accent, and an emoji is one character even though it takes two UTF-16 units. Words come from Intl.Segmenter with word granularity; a hyphen between two word parts is merged back so hyphenated compounds count once. Browsers without the segmenter fall back to a regular expression with the same rules for Latin text. Sentences end at . ! ? … followed by a space or the end of the text; a following lowercase word or a common abbreviation (Dr., e.g., etc.) does not start a new sentence. Paragraphs are blocks separated by a blank line.

reading time = words ÷ 238 wpm    speaking time = words ÷ 150 wpm

238 wpm is the mean silent reading rate for adults reading English non-fiction in Brysbaert’s 2019 meta-analysis of 190 studies (fiction averages 260 wpm). 150 wpm is the pace usually recommended for presentations and audiobook narration; conversational speech runs 120–180 wpm. Word counts, not characters, drive both estimates, so a text full of long words reads slower than the figure suggests.

Platform limits

  • X (Twitter): 280 weighted characters. After NFC normalisation, characters in the Latin, Greek, Cyrillic and general-punctuation ranges weigh 1, everything else (CJK, emoji) weighs 2, and every URL counts as 23 regardless of length (twitter-text config v3). Premium subscribers can post up to 25,000.
  • Instagram captions: 2,200 characters. LinkedIn posts: 3,000 characters.
  • Title tag / meta description: Google truncates by pixel width, not characters; about 60 and 155–160 characters usually fit on desktop. Treat the meters as a guide, not a hard rule.
  • SMS: if every character is in the GSM 03.38 alphabet, a message holds 160 characters (153 per part when concatenated; ^ { } \ [ ] ~ | € cost two). One character outside that alphabet switches the whole message to UCS-2: 70 characters, or 67 per part. The meter names the characters that caused the switch.

Sources: Brysbaert, M. (2019). How many words do we read per minute? Journal of Memory and Language, 109, X Developer Platform – Counting characters, 3GPP TS 23.038 – Alphabets and language-specific information (GSM 7-bit default alphabet), Instagram Help Center – caption limits, Unicode UAX #29 – Text Segmentation (word boundaries).

Limits of the counts

  • Chinese, Japanese and Thai have no spaces; the segmenter uses dictionaries, so word counts may differ from other tools.
  • Sentence counting is rule-based: unusual abbreviations or missing punctuation can shift the count by one or two.
  • Keyword density counts single words only and skips pure numbers.

Questions

Why does my word count differ from Microsoft Word or Google Docs?
Each program draws word boundaries differently. Word treats any text between spaces as a word, so "3 - 4" is three words; this counter follows Unicode rules and counts two, because a lone dash is punctuation. Hyphenated compounds and contractions count as one word in all three.
How many words are 1,000 characters?
English prose averages about 4.7 letters per word plus a space, so 1,000 characters with spaces is roughly 170–180 words. Paste your own text to get the exact figure, including the average word length.
How long does it take to read 1,000 words?
About 4 minutes 12 seconds at the 238 wpm default, or 6 minutes 40 seconds read aloud at 150 wpm.
Is my text uploaded anywhere?
No. The counting runs in your browser; the text is not sent to a server, not stored, and it is deliberately kept out of the shareable link – only the two speed settings and the stop-word switch are saved there.