Free Word & Character Counter
Paste or type text to count words, characters, sentences, and paragraphs. See estimated reading time instantly.
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Why Count Characters?
Character and word counting is essential for content that has specific length requirements — from social media posts to QR code data.
Character Limits You Should Know
- QR Code (alphanumeric) — up to 4,296 characters
- QR Code (numeric only) — up to 7,089 digits
- Twitter/X post — 280 characters
- SMS message — 160 characters (GSM-7) or 70 (Unicode)
- Meta description (SEO) — 150-160 characters recommended
- Title tag (SEO) — 50-60 characters recommended
Reading Time Calculation
Average reading speed is about 200-250 words per minute. This tool uses 225 WPM to estimate reading time, which is a widely accepted average for online content.
Frequently Asked Questions
How is a word counted?
By splitting the text on whitespace and counting the non-empty pieces. That matches what most people mean, but it makes some choices for you: a hyphenated compound counts as one word, an em dash with spaces around it does not count at all, and a numeral counts as a word. Different tools make different choices here, which is why two counters can disagree by a percent or two on the same document.
Why does my word count differ from Microsoft Word or Google Docs?
Because each product defines the boundaries slightly differently. The usual sources of disagreement are hyphenated words, numbers, URLs, text inside footnotes or captions, and whether a standalone symbol counts. None of the answers is wrong; they are different conventions. For anything with a hard limit, count with whatever tool the limit will be checked by.
What is the difference between characters with and without spaces?
Spaces with is the total length of the text, which is what a field limit or a QR code capacity check is measuring. Without spaces is the count of visible characters, which is what typography and translation pricing tend to use. Technical limits almost always mean the first one — a 280-character field counts your spaces.
How is reading time estimated?
By dividing the word count by an assumed silent reading speed. Around 200 to 250 words per minute is the usual assumption for adult reading of general prose, and published research puts average silent reading of English nonfiction near the lower end of that range. It is a rough figure by nature: dense technical material reads far slower, and the estimate says nothing about how long the reader spends thinking.
Will my text fit in a QR code?
The hard ceiling is 2,953 bytes at the lowest error-correction level, but characters and bytes are not the same thing — an accented letter or an emoji costs two to four bytes each, so a count of characters can understate the real size considerably. Fitting is also not the same as scanning: a nearly full QR code is very dense and needs a large, clean print. Our QR code capacity calculator applies the real limits for a given error-correction level.
How are sentences and paragraphs counted?
Sentences are counted by looking for terminating punctuation — full stop, question mark, exclamation mark — and paragraphs by looking for blank lines. Both are approximations that abbreviations and decimal numbers can mislead: Dr. Smith paid $1.50 contains two full stops that end nothing. Treat these as indicative rather than exact.
Does the counter handle emoji and other languages correctly?
Emoji are counted by their visible appearance rather than by the underlying code points, so a single flag or a family emoji counts as one character even though it may occupy many bytes. Languages without spaces between words, such as Chinese and Japanese, cannot be word-counted by splitting on whitespace, so for those the character count is the meaningful number.
Is my text uploaded anywhere?
No. The counting happens in your browser as you type, with no network request, no storage and no analytics on the content. An unpublished draft is safe to paste.
Check QR Code Data Capacity
The Scan & Generate app shows you exactly how much data a QR code can hold, so you can optimize your content before encoding.