Word Count Calculator

Count words, characters, sentences and paragraphs — with reading and speaking times based on measured averages, not the folklore 250 words a minute.

📏 Limits Worth Knowing

SMS, single message160 characters
X / Twitter post280 characters
Meta description~155 before truncation
Page title in search~60 characters
Instagram caption2,200 characters
LinkedIn headline220 characters

About Those Reading Speeds

The widely repeated 250 words a minute is folklore. Brysbaert's 2019 meta-analysis of 190 studies puts silent reading of non-fiction at 238.
Reading aloud is much slower — 183 words a minute. That is why a speech and an article of the same length take very different times.
Speed varies enormously by material. Fiction reads faster than technical prose, and a familiar subject faster than a new one.
Word counts differ slightly between tools. Hyphenated compounds, numbers and em-dashes are all counted differently depending on who wrote the counter.

What Actually Counts as a Word

A word counter splits text on whitespace and counts what is left, which sounds unambiguous until you look at the edge cases. Is a hyphenated compound like well-being one word or two? Is an em-dash between two words a separator? Does a number count, or a URL, or an emoji? Different tools answer differently, which is why the same paragraph can produce counts that differ by a percent or two between a word processor, a content management system and a page like this one. For a school assignment or a publication brief that variation rarely matters. When a hard limit is involved — a 500-word maximum with a penalty attached — check against the tool that will do the marking.

Where 238 Words a Minute Comes From

For decades, style guides and content tools repeated that people read at 250 or 300 words a minute, without any of them citing a source. In 2019 Marc Brysbaert reviewed 190 studies covering more than 18,000 participants and produced the figure this page uses: silent reading of non-fiction averages 238 words per minute, fiction runs faster at around 260, and reading aloud drops to 183. The gap between silent and aloud is the useful one. A 1,000-word article takes about four minutes to read and closer to five and a half to deliver as a speech, which is exactly the sort of mistake that overruns a conference slot.

The Limits That Bite

SMS: 160 characters in a single message using the standard alphabet, dropping to 70 if you include an emoji or an accented character.
X: 280 characters for standard accounts. Links are counted as a fixed length regardless of their real length.
Meta descriptions: Google truncates around 155–160 characters on desktop and less on mobile. It also rewrites them often.
Page titles: roughly 60 characters before truncation, though Google measures pixel width rather than character count.
Email subject lines: mobile clients often show only 30–40 characters, so the first few words carry the whole message.
Character limits count spaces and punctuation. A count without spaces is useful for typography, never for a platform limit.

Typical Lengths, for Calibration

A page of double-spaced 12pt text is roughly 250 words. A single-spaced page is about 500.
A three-minute conference talk is about 550 words read aloud; a twenty-minute one is roughly 3,700.
A newspaper column is typically 600–800 words; a long-form feature runs 2,000–5,000.
A novel starts at about 70,000 words. Below 40,000 it is a novella.
A doctoral thesis usually falls between 70,000 and 100,000 words, though the limit varies by institution and field.
A blog post that ranks well is usually judged by whether it answers the question, not by length. Padding to hit a word target is visible to readers.

Worked Examples

Reading versus speaking

A 1,000-word article

1,000 ÷ 238 = 4.2 minutes to read silently
1,000 ÷ 183 = 5.5 minutes read aloud
The same text, 30% longer as a talk

4 min to read, 5½ to say

Fitting a 20-minute slot

20 minutes × 183 words per minute
= 3,660 words of script
Minus pauses and questions, aim for about 3,000

~3,000 words for 20 minutes

Frequently Asked Questions

How is a word counted?

The text is split on spaces and line breaks, and each remaining chunk counts as one word. Hyphenated compounds count as one, numbers and URLs count as one each. Different tools handle these edge cases slightly differently, so counts can vary by a percent or two.

How long does it take to read 1,000 words?

About four and a quarter minutes silently, at the measured average of 238 words per minute. Read aloud it takes closer to five and a half, because speaking runs at about 183 words per minute.

Is average reading speed really 250 words per minute?

No — that figure has been repeated for decades without a source. Brysbaert's 2019 meta-analysis of 190 studies found 238 words per minute for silent reading of non-fiction, about 260 for fiction, and 183 for reading aloud.

How many words should a speech be?

Multiply the minutes by about 183 and then trim. A twenty-minute slot is roughly 3,660 words of script, but allowing for pauses, emphasis and questions, aim closer to 3,000.

What is the character limit for a meta description?

Google truncates around 155–160 characters on desktop and fewer on mobile, and it measures pixel width rather than characters. It also rewrites descriptions frequently, so treat the limit as guidance rather than a guarantee.

Does the character count include spaces?

Both figures are shown. Platform limits — SMS, X, meta descriptions — always count spaces and punctuation. The count without spaces is useful for typography and for some legacy systems, but never for a posting limit.