Word Counter

Different platforms count different things, which is why the same text can pass one limit and fail another. Most academic and publishing limits are words. Most technical limits are characters, because they map to storage.

Search engines truncate by pixel width rather than character count, but the usual working guidance is around 60 characters for a page title and 155 for a meta description. Going over does not cause a penalty, it just means the end of your sentence is replaced by an ellipsis in the result.

Social platforms and SMS count characters, and both count Unicode in ways that catch people out. A message containing a single emoji can switch an SMS from 160 characters per segment to 70, which is why one emoji sometimes turns one message into two.

Reading time is derived from word count at roughly 200 to 250 words per minute for prose. It is a reasonable estimate for articles and a bad one for anything dense, because nobody reads code samples or reference tables at prose speed.

Keyword density is worth watching only as a warning sign. There is no target percentage that improves rankings, and there has not been for well over a decade. Its remaining use is spotting that you have repeated a phrase far more than natural writing would, which reads badly to a person long before it matters to a search engine.

Counting runs on Unicode-aware rules, so scripts without spaces between words and languages such as Sinhala and Hindi are handled properly rather than being counted as one enormous word.