Last checked by the TextEditor.com team
How words are counted, and why counters disagree
Most counters split the text at spaces and count the pieces. That works for English until the text has hyphens, numbers or symbols. Is "well-known" one word or two? Is 2026 a word? Microsoft Word says yes to both, because it only looks at spaces. Other tools count only groups of letters and digits, so "66.7%" becomes two words and a lone "--" counts as nothing.
Chinese, Japanese and Thai do not put spaces between words, so a space counter sees a whole sentence as one word. This page asks the browser instead. Browsers have word rules for those languages built in, in the Intl.Segmenter API. Type a tricky sentence and see how the three methods differ.
- 12 Split at spaces. Counts "--" and "(66.7%)" as words, and the Japanese sentence as one word.
- 14 Groups of letters and digits. Drops "--", splits "well-known" and "66.7", and still sees one Japanese word.
- 18 Browser word rules, used on this page. Splits the Japanese sentence into its words.
Two counters that disagree by a few words are both right by their own rules. When a limit matters, for example a 650 word essay, check it with the tool the reader will use. To see what changed between two drafts, use the text compare tool.
How characters are counted
A character count sounds simple, but there are three numbers. Code points are entries in the Unicode list. UTF-16 units are how JavaScript and many apps store text, and anything outside the first 65,536 code points, like most emoji, takes two units. Graphemes are what you see: one flag, one accented letter, one family emoji.
This page counts graphemes, so "é" is one character even when it is typed as an e plus an accent mark, and 👍🏽 is one character even though it is two code points and four UTF-16 units. Hover over the character count under the text to see the other numbers, or open the character counter to see all of them side by side. Styled letters from the fancy text generator take two units each, so a 280 unit limit fits only 140 of them.
14 characters you see, 16 code points, 24 UTF-16 units, 41 bytes in UTF-8.
How long is a page, an essay or a novel?
| Text | Typical length | Where the number comes from |
|---|---|---|
| X post | 280 characters, about 40 to 55 words | X limit for regular accounts, checked October 2026 |
| Text message | 160 characters | GSM standard, plain alphabet |
| One page, 12 point, double spaced | About 250 words | Rule of thumb with 1 inch margins. Single spaced holds about 500. |
| College application essay | 250 to 650 words | Common App limit, checked October 2026 |
| 5 minute speech | About 750 words | 150 words a minute |
| Short story | Under 7,500 words | Nebula Award categories |
| Novella | 17,500 to 40,000 words | Nebula Award categories |
| Novel | Over 40,000 words, most are 70,000 to 100,000 | Nebula Award lower bound; publishers' usual range |
Counts do not change with capital letters, so fix the case of a title in the case converter without touching your word count.
Reading time and speaking time
The reading time uses 238 words a minute. The number comes from a 2019 review by Marc Brysbaert, who pooled 190 studies of adults reading silently in English. Non fiction came out at 238 words a minute and fiction at 260. People read slower on a phone and much slower when the text is hard.
Speaking time uses 150 words a minute, the pace of a calm talk or an audiobook. A 5 minute speech is about 750 words.
| Pace | Words a minute | Time |
|---|---|---|
| Speaking aloud | 150 | 6 min 40 sec |
| Reading non fiction | 238 | 4 min 12 sec |
| Reading fiction | 260 | 3 min 51 sec |
| Skimming | 400 | 2 min 30 sec |
What the reading level means
The Flesch Reading Ease score rates English text from 0 to 100 using two things: how long the sentences are and how many syllables the words have. Short sentences with short words score high. Rudolf Flesch published it in 1948. The grade version, Flesch-Kincaid, came in 1975 and turns the same two numbers into a US school grade.
The1 cat1 sat1 on1 the1 warm1 mat1 and1 fell1 asleep2
206.835 − 1.015 × (10 ÷ 1) − 84.6 × (11 ÷ 10) = 103.6 (very easy, 5th grade). Grade: 1.3.
Scores of 90 and above are very easy, 60 to 70 is plain English, 30 to 50 reads like a college text, and below 30 is for specialists. Most newspapers land between 50 and 70. The score knows nothing about meaning, so a short nonsense sentence scores well. It works on English only, and the syllable count is a rule of thumb, so Word may show a slightly different number.
For all six formulas and the sentences to fix, use the readability checker.
Character limits on social media
The Limits panel in the tool checks your text against the posting limits of X, Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, Discord and text messages, as checked in October 2026. X counts in its own way: most emoji and Chinese characters are 2, and every link is 23, no matter how long. A text message holds 160 characters, but one emoji or curly quote switches it to a different alphabet and only 70 fit. The character counter marks those characters and swaps them for plain ones.
More ways to check your text
- Check the reading levelShort words and short sentences are easy to read. → Grade 5Six formulas, plus the long sentences marked for you.
- Compare two textsthe
oldnew catText compare marks what was added and what was removed. - Clean up pasted texta b → a bThe text cleaner removes extra spaces and hidden characters.
- Remove repeated linesa a b → a bKeeps the first copy of each line and drops the rest.
- See your words as a cloudAlice rabbit doorThe word cloud generator draws the most used words, sized by count.