Count words, characters, sentences, paragraphs. Estimate reading time. Check SEO content limits. Works for essays, blogs, and social media posts.
Reading time is calculated based on the average adult reading speed of 200–250 words per minute. This tool uses 238 words per minute, which is the commonly cited average for silent reading. Speaking time uses 130 words per minute, the typical rate for clear speech. Academic research suggests reading speeds vary widely — fast readers can do 400+ wpm while slow readers may be 150 wpm. For blog posts, 200 wpm is a safe estimate for time-to-read metadata.
For SEO purposes, longer content generally ranks better because it covers a topic more comprehensively. Guidelines: Homepage/landing page: 300–500 words (minimum). Blog post: 1,500–2,500 words for competitive topics. Pillar/cornerstone content: 3,000–5,000+ words. Product pages: 300–500 words. However, quality matters more than quantity — thin content padded to hit a word count performs poorly. Target the minimum needed to fully answer the user's search intent.
Key character limits in 2026: Twitter/X posts — 280 characters (4,000 for Premium). LinkedIn posts — 3,000 characters. Instagram captions — 2,200 characters. Facebook posts — 63,206 characters. WhatsApp messages — 65,536 characters. YouTube titles — 100 characters. YouTube descriptions — 5,000 characters. Meta title tags (SEO) — 50–60 characters. Meta description tags (SEO) — 150–160 characters. This tool's preset buttons help you quickly check against these limits.
Sentences are counted by splitting text at sentence-ending punctuation: periods (.), exclamation marks (!), and question marks (?). Common abbreviations and decimal numbers may inflate the sentence count slightly. Paragraphs are counted as blocks of text separated by two or more line breaks (blank lines). A heading followed immediately by a paragraph would count as two paragraphs. Single line breaks within a paragraph do not create a new paragraph count.
Yes. This word counter splits text on whitespace and punctuation, so it works with any language that separates words with spaces — including Hindi (Devanagari), Urdu, Arabic, Bengali, Tamil, and most other scripts. Character counting is Unicode-aware and correctly counts multi-byte characters. However, reading time estimates are calibrated for English reading speeds and may not be accurate for non-Latin scripts where reading speed varies significantly by script complexity.