Word / Character / Reading Time Counter

Live counts of words, characters, sentences and paragraphs as you type or paste, plus an estimated reading time and speaking time — for hitting a word count target, checking a meta description or tweet fits, or timing a script before you read it out loud.

Where the reading time estimate actually comes from

200 words per minute is the commonly cited average adult silent reading speed for general text, and it's what most "X min read" estimates on blogs and publishing platforms are quietly built on. It's an average, not a law — technical documentation with code and diagrams reads slower, easy narrative prose reads faster, and any individual reader varies — but it's a reasonable, industry-standard baseline for exactly the "roughly how long will this take" estimate people actually want.

Why speaking time is a separate, slower number

Comfortable spoken delivery runs closer to 130 words per minute — noticeably slower than silent reading, which is why a script that reads back quickly in your head can run long once you're actually presenting it out loud. If you're timing a talk, a video voiceover, or a podcast segment, the speaking-time estimate is the one that actually matters, not the reading-time one — using the wrong number here is a common reason presentations run over their allotted slot.

How sentence and paragraph counts are actually detected

Sentences are counted by scanning for terminal punctuation — periods, question marks, exclamation points — which works well for normal prose and gets thrown off by abbreviations (e.g., Dr.) and decimal numbers, the same limitation any simple sentence counter has without a full language model behind it. Paragraphs are counted as blocks of text separated by a blank line, matching how paragraphs are conventionally represented in plain text and Markdown alike.

Common places this actually gets used

• Meta descriptions and title tags, which search engines truncate at specific character counts
• Twitter/X posts and other character-limited platforms
• Academic or professional writing with a strict word count requirement
• Timing a presentation, video script, or voiceover before recording