How the counts work
Words are groups of characters separated by whitespace. Sentences end with a period, exclamation mark or question mark. Paragraphs are blocks separated by a blank line. Characters are counted by Unicode code point, so emoji and accented letters count once.
Reading time
Reading time assumes about 238 words per minute, a commonly cited average for silent reading of adult non-fiction. Speaking time is usually longer, around 130 to 160 words per minute.
Common limits
- X (Twitter) posts: 280 characters on standard accounts.
- Meta descriptions: roughly 150 to 160 characters before truncation in search results.
- SMS: 160 characters per segment in the GSM-7 alphabet.