Count words & characters — instantly, right in your browser.

The Word Counter is your free online tool for counting words and characters instantly — no sign-up, no installation, and your text is never uploaded anywhere. If you want to count characters online or check the word count of a text, you see all the important values at a glance: words, characters with and without spaces, sentences, paragraphs, unique words, plus reading and speaking time. Whether it’s an essay with a word limit, a job application, a social media post, a meta description or a speech — our word counter recalculates every change in real time as you type.

Counting characters is part of everyday work in many jobs: social media managers keep posts under 280 characters, SEO writers trim meta descriptions to about 155 and title tags to 60 characters, and a classic SMS allows 160. Because platforms and forms count differently, our character counter shows both values side by side at all times — characters with spaces and characters without spaces. If you want to count the characters of a text, just paste it in: the analysis starts instantly, no button click required.

Unlike many international counters, our word counter understands your language. Accented characters are counted correctly, hyphenated words like “state-of-the-art” or “mother-in-law” count as one word, and abbreviations like “e.g.”, “etc.” or “i.e.” don’t split your sentences. Apostrophe compounds like “don’t” are cleanly recognized as one word, too. This precision makes the result comparable to the count in Word — and often more reliable than simple counters that blindly split at every space.

For everyone who wants to check not just numbers but content, the Word Counter includes a keyword analysis. It shows the most frequent words of your text with absolute counts and density — ideal for spotting filler words or checking the keyword density of an SEO text. With one click you hide stop words like “the”, “and” and “of” and see only the terms that really matter. Bloggers, marketers and writers use this analysis to vary their phrasing and catch repetitions early.

The built-in limits are just as practical: simply pick “X / Post”, “SMS”, “WhatsApp status”, “Meta description” or “Title tag” — the progress bar shows you live how much of the limit is left and warns you before you go over. For essays and summaries with a required length there is the word goal: enter 250 words, for example, and you always see how far you’ve come and how many words are still missing. A custom character limit takes seconds to set up.

Privacy is not an afterthought for a counting tool — after all, you paste job applications, contracts or confidential texts here. That’s why the entire Word Counter runs 100 % in your browser: no server upload, no cookies, no tracking, no storage of what you type. Only your draft stays saved locally so you can continue after a reload. And once the page has loaded, it even works offline — counting characters online has never been more privacy-friendly.

Beyond words and characters, the tool calculates more values that help in daily work: reading time (200 words per minute for silent reading) and speaking time (120 words per minute for presentations) show you how long a text feels — important for speeches, podcasts, video scripts and presentations. Add to that the average sentence length, the average word length, the number of unique words and the longest word of your text. At a glance you can tell whether your sentences run tight or sprawling.

Of course you can count characters in Word (“Review → Word Count”) or in Google Docs (“Tools → Word count”) — but those dialogs only show a snapshot, with no limits, word goals or keywords. Our counter adds exactly that and runs independently of any program. If you want to count the characters in a PDF, you’re in the right place too: PDF content can usually be copied and pasted, after which we count words, characters and sentences as usual. Paste text, done — that’s all it takes. No account, no download, no ads.

The Word Counter is used by all kinds of people: students check term papers against word requirements, pupils shorten summaries, journalists stick to briefs, translators bill by characters without spaces, community managers optimize posts for X, LinkedIn, Instagram and WhatsApp, and speakers calculate whether their speech fits the time slot. Because the tool costs nothing, collects no data and runs on any device, it works for every text — from a three-word caption to a 10,000-word article.

A typical working day with the Word Counter looks like this: you write your text at your own pace in Word, Google Docs or directly in the counter’s text field. In between you glance at the word and character counts, check the progress bar against your chosen limit and see in the keyword analysis which terms are piling up. At the end you save the text as a file, copy it back into your document or clear the field with one click — knowing that no copy of your text ever landed on a server.

In short: the Word Counter combines word counter, character counter, sentence analysis and keyword tool in one fast, ad-free page — completely free and privacy-friendly. Whether you want to count words, count characters, track a word goal or check your keyword density: everything runs in real time right on your device. Just try it above — type or paste your text and see for yourself how quickly the analysis appears.