The quick answer: count, find the gap, cut, count again
You are 40 words over the limit, or 12 characters over, and Word, your phone and a website all show different totals. Paste the text into the word counter. It shows words, characters with and without spaces, sentences, paragraphs, reading time and speaking time, all updating as you type.
- Paste the text, or only the part the limit covers. Titles, quotations and references are often counted differently, so read the rule first.
- Subtract the limit from the count. That is how much to cut.
- Scroll to Top keywords to see which words you lean on. Cut filler and repeated points, then recount.
- For a post with a character limit, check it in the character counter, which follows the counting rules of the platforms it lists. Then confirm the number in the program that will judge it.
Why two counters give two answers
There is no official rule for what a word is. A counter has to decide about hyphens, numbers, links and symbols, and each one decides a little differently. These are the rules in the ClipLime word counter, checked against real input:
| Text | Counts as | Why |
|---|---|---|
| well-known | 1 word | A hyphenated word is one word |
| 3.14 or 1,000 | 1 word | A number with a decimal point or thousands separators is one word |
| 10:30 | 2 words | The colon splits it into 10 and 30 |
| 1/2 | 2 words | The slash splits it |
| https://example.com/pi | 1 word | A link counts once |
| [email protected] | 1 word | An email address counts once |
| example.com/page | 2 words | Without http:// or www. it is not read as a link |
| &, a dash or one emoji alone | 0 words | Loose symbols are not words |
A counter that splits only on spaces would count 10:30 as one word and a lone emoji as one. Neither choice is wrong. In a long text these differences move the total by a few words, which is why a limit that matters should be checked in the program that judges it.
Chinese and Japanese are written without spaces, so the counter finds words with your browser's built-in dictionary. The split is close but not perfect, and the reading and speaking times use English speeds, so treat them as rough.
Characters, with and without spaces
Characters counts everything, spaces and line breaks included. Characters without spaces leaves out every space, tab and line break. Extra spaces change the character count but not the word count. Hello world. This is text. is 5 words and 26 characters. Type it with three doubled spaces and it is still 5 words, but 29 characters.
A hidden zero width space still counts as a character in both numbers. If pasted text seems longer than it looks, remove invisible characters and collapse repeated spaces with the text cleaner.
What counts as one character depends on who is counting. The word counter counts what a reader sees. Computers store text in units, and an emoji or an accented letter can take several:
| Text | As a reader sees it | In UTF-16 units |
|---|---|---|
| café, with é as one character | 4 | 4 |
| café, with e plus a combining accent | 4 | 5 |
| One smiley emoji | 1 | 2 |
| One family emoji of three people | 1 | 8 |
| One flag emoji | 1 | 4 |
| hello in bold Unicode letters, as some caption generators produce | 5 | 10 |
The character counter treats most social platforms as counting in those units, so emoji and fancy letters can cost two or more. X weights characters instead, giving every link a fixed cost and counting emoji and Chinese, Japanese and Korean characters as two. Bluesky counts what you see. Platforms change these rules and their limits from time to time, so look up the current limit in the app, and test your text against it in the character counter. Each platform card turns amber near the limit and coral over it, and highlights the text that would be cut off.
Reading time and speaking time
Both are the word count divided by a typical speed. The word counter uses 238 words per minute for silent reading, a commonly cited average for adults reading non-fiction, and 150 words per minute for speaking, a comfortable pace for a talk or a voice over. The script timer lets you choose 120 (slow), 150 or 180 (fast), or any pace from 80 to 240.
| Words | Read silently, 238 wpm | Say at 120 wpm | Say at 150 wpm | Say at 180 wpm |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 300 | 1 min 16 sec | 2 min 30 sec | 2 min | 1 min 40 sec |
| 500 | 2 min 6 sec | 4 min 10 sec | 3 min 20 sec | 2 min 47 sec |
| 1,000 | 4 min 12 sec | 8 min 20 sec | 6 min 40 sec | 5 min 33 sec |
| 2,500 | 10 min 30 sec | 20 min 50 sec | 16 min 40 sec | 13 min 53 sec |
Going the other way, a 30 second slot holds 60 to 90 words, a 60 second slot 120 to 180 words, and 3 minutes 360 to 540. Real recordings run longer than the sum, because words are not equal. $1,250 is one word to a counter and four or more to a speaker. Pauses, laughs and retakes add seconds. Aim about 10% under the slot. In the script timer, anything in [square brackets] is left out of the count by default, which suits stage directions. To find your own pace, read a paragraph aloud for exactly one minute. The words you got through are your words per minute.
How many words is a page?
There is no single answer. It depends on the font, the size, the margins and the line spacing. Set a page up the way your assignment or publisher asks, paste one full page into the counter, and use that count as your words per page.
How to hit a target length
- Over by a little. Cut whole sentences before words: warm-up openings, a point made twice, a list that runs one item too long. Recount after each pass so you stop at the target and not below it.
- Over by characters. Replace long words, remove double spaces and trailing spaces, and shorten links. Spaces count as characters, so the text cleaner can win a few for you.
- Under. Add one concrete example, number or step. Repeating yourself adds words and takes away value.
- Both versions. To see what changed between two drafts, use compare two texts. Switching between upper, lower, title and sentence case with change text case does not change the word count.
The Top keywords list helps with the first case. It shows the words you use most with a count and a share. The common word filter (the, and, of) is English only, and cat and cats are counted as two words.
Three ways it goes wrong
- The limit counts something else. Essay briefs, abstracts and grant forms decide whether titles, headings, quotations, footnotes and references are included. Fix: paste only the part that counts.
- The platform counts differently from your tool. Emoji, links and fancy letters are the usual cause. Fix: check the post in the character counter, then in the app itself before you rely on it.
- Pasted text carries extras. Double spaces, line breaks from a PDF, HTML tags and invisible characters all change a character count. Fix: clean the text first, then count.
Scripts for video are a related job. How to add chapters to YouTube videos uses the script timer to plan section lengths.