Typing speed
How many words a minute you actually type, in English or Italian, with the accuracy and the errors that remain.
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Word and character counter
Words, characters, sentences, standard pages and reading time, with the limits for X, Instagram and the meta description.
Free, in the browser, no account
Words
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Characters
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Sentences
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Standard pages
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Reading
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Read aloud
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The limits
X0 / 280 · 280 left
Instagram bio0 / 150 · 150 left
Meta description0 / 158 · 158 left
SEO title0 / 60 · 60 left
Indicative, and it is worth knowing why. X weights characters — an ideogram counts as two, a web address always as twenty-three — and Google does not cut the description at a character count but at a pixel width, which depends on the letters. A hundred and fifty-eight is the threshold that almost always works, not a written rule.
An Italian editorial page — a cartella — is 1800 keystrokes including spaces: thirty lines of sixty. Spaces count because the measure comes from the typewritten page, where a space took one keystroke like a letter.
Two hundred words a minute silently, a hundred and thirty aloud. These are averages: they answer "how long is it", not "time me". A five-minute talk and a five-minute article are not the same length.
The apostrophe splits when it is an elision and not when it is a contraction: "l’altro" is two words, "don’t" is one. The rule looks at what follows the apostrophe, not at which language you are writing in — which is why a surname like "O’Brien" is counted as two. That is the price of not consulting a dictionary, and it is better to know it.
Accents stay inside the word and emoji count one each: "perché" is one word and 🎹 is one character, not two.
Everything happens in your browser: the text is not sent anywhere.
How it works
- Paste or type the text. There are no buttons: the numbers update on their own.
- Watch the pages if you are delivering, the reading time if you are speaking.
- The bars say how much is left before each limit: X, Instagram bio, meta description, title.
Why it exists
Because a piece is delivered in pages, a talk is measured in minutes and a post is measured in characters, and those are three different units for the same text. And because the word processor’s count lives inside a menu, not in front of you while you are cutting.
About the apostrophe
l'altro is two words. don't is one. That is not a contradiction: in Italian the apostrophe is an
elision and sits between two words, in English it is a contraction and sits inside one. A
bilingual site cannot pick one of the two rules and ignore the other.
The rule I use does not look at the language, it looks at what follows the apostrophe: in Italian a
whole word follows — altro, amico, anno — in English a fragment of a verb, and the possible
fragments are a small closed set (s, t, re, ve, ll, d, m).
The price of not consulting a dictionary is declared: a surname like O'Brien is counted as two
words. Better to know it than to find out.
About standard pages
The Italian editorial page — a cartella — is 1800 keystrokes including spaces: thirty lines of sixty. Spaces count because the measure comes from the typewritten page, where a space took exactly one keystroke, like a letter. Counting without them would give about fifteen per cent less, which is one page in seven — not a detail on work paid by the page.
About the characters you can see
An emoji counts as one, not two. It sounds obvious and for a program it is not: internally 🎹
occupies two units and a three-person family occupies eight. Those are numbers that correspond to
nothing visible, and no social limit would use them. Here the count is of the marks a person would
count with a finger.
For the same reason perché is one word and not two, and a text in Cyrillic gets counted instead of
returning zero.
About the limits
They are indicative, and it is worth knowing why. X weights characters rather than counting them: an ideogram counts as two, a web address always counts as twenty-three whatever its length. And Google does not cut the description at a character count but at a pixel width, which depends on the letters inside it — a hundred and fifty-eight is the threshold that almost always works, not a rule written down anywhere.
About your data
The text does not leave your browser. This site is made of static files and has no server to send it to, even if it wanted one — which for a tool where you paste unpublished writing is worth saying plainly.
From here you also go here
Pomodoro
Twenty-five minutes and five, adjustable, with the long break on the fourth round and a sound that arrives on time even in the background.
Text readability
Paste a text and get the GULPEASE index in Italian or Flesch in English, with over-long sentences marked and the words you repeat.