Free Online Word and Character Counters

Two counters sit behind these pages and they answer different questions. One is about writing: words, sentences, reading time, and how hard the text is to read. The other is about characters: which ones appear, how often, and whether the whole thing fits inside a limit.

Both update as you type, and both count whole characters as a reader sees them, so an emoji counts once rather than as the two or three code points it is built from.

Both are also more useful than the number in the corner of a word processor, because they show their working. A total on its own will not tell you that one sentence runs to sixty words, that a phrase appears eleven times, or which characters are eating into your limit, and all three of those are things you can actually act on.