Paste a passage to see its length in words and characters, plus the sentence-level signals that are easy to miss by eye.
Calculated at 200 words per minute. Real reading time depends on the reader and the subject.
A word is any run of characters between whitespace. That is a deliberately plain rule: it matches what most writing tools do on ordinary prose, and it is easy to check against a sample you already trust.
Characters are counted as the text sits, spaces included. The “without spaces” figure is there because a form that limits characters and a form that limits letters do not measure the same thing.
Languages written without spaces will be undercounted, because the rule expects spaces. Code, URLs and hyphenated compounds can land on either side depending on the tool that produced the original.
The long-sentence count is a signal, not a fault. A twenty-eight-word sentence can be the clearest way to say something; the number is only there to tell you where to look.
If a publisher, school or platform gives you a live counter, that counter is the authority for its own limit — not this page.