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Guide

How to Count Words, Characters, and Reading Time

Get word count, character count, and estimated reading time for any text. Useful for essays, captions, and SEO drafts.

1 min readBy Micro Task Assistant
  • writing
  • word count
  • productivity
  • how-to

Word and character limits show up in school, job applications, and social media. A counter saves time and helps you edit with a target.

Count words (step by step)

  1. Open Word Counter.
  2. Paste or type your text.
  3. Read the totals: words, characters, sentences, and reading time.

Practical uses

  • Keep an essay within a word limit
  • Trim a cover letter to one page
  • Check description length for a form
  • Estimate how long a post takes to read

Tip for clean counts

If you paste from a PDF or OCR, remove extra line breaks first. It makes sentence counts more accurate.

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