Word counts gate essays, tweets, metas and speeches — different limits, same anxiety. This counter tracks everything at once, live: words, characters with and without spaces, sentences, paragraphs, and the two timings writers actually need.
Reading vs speaking time
Silent reading averages 238 words per minute for adults (Brysbaert's 2019 meta-analysis of 190 studies); comfortable presentation speech runs near 150. The same 1,000-word draft is a 4-minute read but a 6:40 talk — the difference between a blog post and a conference slot. Both clocks run live as you type.
The platform limit chips
The badges under the counts track the ceilings that actually bite: 280 characters for a tweet, 160 for SMS and meta descriptions, 60 for title tags — each flipping red the moment you cross it. Characters count spaces, because the platforms do.
What counts as a word, sentence, paragraph
Words are whitespace-separated tokens — so hyphenated compounds ("state-of-the-art") count once. Sentences are detected by terminal punctuation, which abbreviations can inflate slightly; treat it as a close estimate. Paragraphs split on blank lines, the universal plain-text convention.
Length guidance, honestly
Conventions worth knowing: 500–1,000 words for school essays, 1,500–2,500 for long-form posts, ~40 seconds of speech per slide. But completeness beats padding everywhere that matters — search engines included. Your text never leaves the browser (typed drafts stay yours), and for the typing side of the speed equation, the typing speed test measures your WPM.
All counting local to your browser; nothing uploaded.