Why counts differ between tools
Word counts from different programs rarely agree exactly, because each one makes different decisions about edge cases. Is "well-known" one word or two? Is "3.5" a word? Does an em dash with no spaces join two words? Microsoft Word, Google Docs and most online counters each answer those questions slightly differently, and the gap grows with the amount of punctuation in the text.
This counter treats hyphenated words and contractions as single words, counts numbers as words, and ignores standalone punctuation. If a publication has a hard word limit, check which tool they use and leave a margin of a few words either way.
Characters with and without spaces
Most character limits online, including the ones in the presets, count spaces. Some academic and translation contexts use characters without spaces instead, and translators often quote per 1,000 characters without spaces. Both figures are shown so you can use whichever one your brief asks for. Emoji and other symbols count as one character each here. Note that platforms sometimes weigh characters differently: X counts most emoji and East Asian characters as two, and an SMS switches to a 70-character limit as soon as it contains any character outside the GSM alphabet. For SMS specifically, use the SMS character counter, which handles encoding and segments.
Reading time and speaking time
The reading estimate uses 238 words per minute, which is the average silent reading speed for adults reading English non-fiction found in a large 2019 review of reading-rate studies. Real readers vary widely: skimmers go faster, and dense technical content goes slower. Treat the figure as a planning number for "5 min read" labels, email length and lesson timing rather than a promise.
The speaking estimate uses 130 words per minute, a comfortable pace for presentations, voice-overs and podcast scripts. Audiobook narration and conference talks tend to sit between 120 and 160. If you are timing a speech, read it aloud once with a stopwatch and compare; then you will know whether you speak faster or slower than the average and can adjust.
Using the keyword list
The top keywords list shows the ten most frequent words after removing about 180 common English stop words such as "the", "and", "with" and "your". It is useful for two opposite checks. For SEO, confirm that the term you want a page to rank for actually appears, and that it is not so frequent that the text reads as stuffed; a share above 2% to 3% for a single word often reads unnaturally. For general writing, the list exposes crutch words. If "really", "very" or "just" are in your top ten, the draft probably needs a pass to cut them.
Character limits worth knowing
- X (Twitter): 280 characters. Links count as 23 characters regardless of length, and some characters count double.
- Meta description: about 155 characters. Google truncates by pixel width rather than a fixed count, so 150 to 155 is the safe range for desktop and less for mobile.
- Instagram caption: 2,200 characters, but only the first two lines show before "more", so put the point first.
- LinkedIn post: 3,000 characters, with the first three lines visible before "see more".
- SMS: 160 characters in a single GSM-7 message, or 70 with Unicode characters such as emoji.
The presets count plain characters including spaces, which matches how most people check a draft. For exact behaviour on each platform, paste the final text into the platform itself before publishing.