Character Counter Online Free Tool
Character Counter, graphemes, words, sentences, paragraphs, reading time. Tweet/SMS/Meta limit badges. Free, client-side, instant.
Emoji-aware character, word, sentence, paragraph, reading-time, and target-limit counter — everything runs in your browser.
How to Use Character Counter Online Free Tool
- Type or paste text into the large textarea. Every stat recomputes on the next keystroke - no button needed.
- Pick a target limit from the dropdown: Tweet (280), SMS (160), Meta title (60), Meta description (160), or Custom for anything else.
- Watch the remaining badge: it turns red and the textarea border goes amber when you exceed the limit, so you can catch over-runs without looking away from your text.
- Read the twelve-tile grid: characters (UTF-16 units), graphemes (how humans count, emoji-aware), characters without spaces, words, unique words, longest word, average word length, sentences, paragraphs, lines, reading time (225 wpm), speaking time (150 wpm).
- Press
Ctrl+Enter(⌘+Enteron Mac) to force a fresh recount - useful right after a paste to trigger the info toast. - Copy the stats as a plain-text summary, ready to paste into a report or prompt.
- Download .txt saves the stats summary plus the original text with a timestamped filename, so you can archive a snapshot.
Frequently asked questions
Is my text uploaded anywhere?
No. Counting runs entirely in your browser with JavaScript. Your text never leaves the device – there is no fetch, no XHR, and no analytics on the content.
What’s the difference between characters and graphemes?
“Characters” counts UTF-16 code units – a flag emoji like 🇬🇷 is 4 code units. “Graphemes” counts what a human reader sees – the same flag is 1 grapheme. Twitter’s 280-character limit is actually a grapheme-like count, so match against the graphemes tile, not the characters tile.
Does the character count include spaces?
Yes, the “Characters” and “Graphemes” tiles include spaces, punctuation, and newlines. The “No spaces” tile shows the count with every whitespace character stripped, matching what many word-limit forms expect.
How does the tool count words?
Words are runs of non-whitespace characters. Hyphenated words (“state-of-the-art”) and contractions (“don’t”) count as single words, matching the way most editors and platforms count.
What counts as a sentence?
A run of ., !, or ? followed by whitespace or end-of-text. Consecutive punctuation like !!! counts as one sentence. Abbreviations like “Dr.” will be over-counted – no heuristic catches every case.
How is reading time estimated?
Word count divided by 225 words per minute (average adult reading speed). Speaking time uses 150 words per minute, roughly the pace of a natural podcast voice-over.
Can I set a custom character limit?
Yes – pick “Custom…” in the target limit dropdown and enter any positive integer. The remaining badge updates instantly and the textarea border highlights once you cross the limit.
What does “unique words” mean?
The count of distinct words after lowercasing – so “The” and “the” are treated as the same entry. Handy for checking vocabulary spread in short copy.
Is there a length limit?
No hard cap. The counter handles a million characters in well under 50 ms on a modern laptop. Very old browsers without Intl.Segmenter fall back to a simpler grapheme count that still handles surrogate pairs.
Does it work offline?
After the page loads, yes. HTML, CSS, and JS are self-contained – you can disconnect Wi-Fi and keep counting.