Letter Counter

A letter counter — sometimes called a character counter or word counter — tells you exactly how many letters, characters, words, sentences, and paragraphs are in a block of text. The tool is the quiet workhorse of anyone who writes against a limit: social-media managers hitting the 280-character tweet cap, copywriters shipping 60-character SEO titles, marketers fitting a Google Ads headline into 30 characters, SMS gateways keeping messages under the 160-character segment line, or a student triple-checking a 500-word essay.

Characters, words, letters, and digits all mean slightly different things, and mixing them up leads to bad counts. A character is any single unit of text, including letters, numbers, punctuation, and spaces. Characters without spaces excludes the whitespace, which is the version most platforms use for their limits. A letter is a Unicode letter character — A through Z, plus accented and non-Latin letters; it excludes digits and punctuation. Digits is exactly what it sounds like. A word is a whitespace-delimited run of characters, with no minimum length requirement. We show all of these so you can pick the one a specific limit cares about.

Sentence counting is trickier because natural language does not always end on a full stop. Lists, headlines, and programmatic output often skip punctuation. We split on period, exclamation, question mark, and ellipsis followed by whitespace or end-of-input. That matches what Grammarly and most plagiarism detectors use. It will under-count text that uses unusual punctuation (like Japanese 。 or Arabic ۔) and over-count if you abbreviate heavily. For most English prose it lands within 5% of a careful manual count.

The limits panel shows your current text against every mainstream platform's cap. Over 80% is a yellow warning; over 100% turns red. For SEO meta titles, Google's SERP truncates after about 60 characters on desktop (narrower on mobile); stay under 58 to be safe. Meta descriptions have 160–170 characters before truncation. Tweets hard-cap at 280 for text; URLs are counted as 23 characters regardless of real length. SMS at 160 is per-segment; past that your carrier may split the message and charge extra.

Reading time is calculated at 200 words per minute, a published average for adult silent reading of easy prose. Speaking time uses 130 words per minute, the broadcast-standard for audiobook pacing. Multiply or divide based on your audience: technical documentation is slower to read; children's books are faster; public-speaking coaches often target 100–120 wpm for clarity.

1. Paste or type your text. The input accepts any length — character counts are live and update as you type.
2. Read the stats. The side panel shows characters (with and without spaces), letters, digits, words, sentences, paragraphs, and lines.
3. Check common limits. The limits panel shows progress bars against Twitter, SMS, SEO, and ad platforms.
4. Check reading and speaking time. Useful for sizing blog posts and video scripts.
5. Copy stats. The Copy button places the full stats block on your clipboard, formatted for pasting into a report.

• Eight counts: characters (with/without spaces), letters, digits, words, sentences, paragraphs, lines.
• Live progress bars against Twitter, SMS, Meta title/desc, LinkedIn, Instagram, Google Ads, Pinterest.
• Reading and speaking time estimates at 200 and 130 wpm.
• Longest word detection for proofreading.
• Copy the full stats block to clipboard with one click.
• Runs entirely in your browser — your text never leaves your device.