CGLTyping
Character & Word Counter
Paste or type any text to see character count, word count, key depressions and estimated typing time — instantly, nothing leaves your browser.
Why Key Depressions and Word Count Both Matter
Government typing tests measure speed two different ways: SSC's DEST counts key depressions — every character including spaces and punctuation — while most other exams (CHSL, RRB NTPC, CPCT) state a words per minute target instead. This counter shows both simultaneously, along with a sentence count and a rough typing-time estimate, so you can gauge how long a passage would take you regardless of which unit your target exam uses.
The estimated time uses the standard convention of 5 characters per word and a 30 WPM benchmark — a reasonable mid-range speed. Your actual time will vary with your real typing speed; use the WPM Calculator to convert your own numbers precisely.
What People Actually Use This For
Three jobs, mostly:
- Checking whether a practice passage is exam-length. SSC CGL's DEST passage runs to roughly 2,000 key depressions. Paste any passage you found online and you'll know in a second whether it's the real length or a 900-character stub that'll flatter your timing.
- Sanity-checking a "2000 word" claim. Passages get shared with wildly wrong descriptions. Depressions are the unit that matters — this tells you the true number rather than the one in the file name.
- Building your own drill material. Trim or extend text to a target count before loading it into the custom passage test.
How Each Count Is Defined
Counters disagree with each other constantly, so here's exactly what this one does — no guessing:
| Metric | What it counts | Why it matters |
|---|---|---|
| Characters | Every character, spaces included | Closest to a key-depression count for plain lowercase text |
| Characters (no spaces) | Excludes spaces | What some word processors report — usually not what an exam means |
| Words | Runs of text separated by whitespace | The unit CHSL, NTPC and CPCT state their requirement in |
| Key depressions | Characters, treated as one keystroke each | The unit SSC CGL's DEST is scored in |
One honest caveat on key depressions: on a real keyboard a capital letter costs two physical presses (Shift plus the letter), and this counter — like most — counts the resulting character once. For ordinary prose the gap is small. For text that's heavy on capitals, codes or symbols, treat the depression count as a floor rather than an exact figure.
Works in Any Language or Script
Paste Hindi, Punjabi, Marathi, Gujarati or Tamil and the counts still work — the tool counts Unicode characters, not just Latin letters. That makes it useful for checking Hindi passages before a Mangal or Unicode practice session.
Kruti Dev is the one exception worth flagging. It's a legacy non-Unicode font where keys map to Latin-range glyphs that merely look like Devanagari, so pasted Kruti Dev text counts as the Latin characters it technically is. That's actually closer to the true keystroke count than a Unicode reading would be — but the word count will look wrong. Kruti Dev vs Unicode explains why.
Nothing you paste is uploaded or stored. This is a static site with no server to send it to — the counting happens in your browser and disappears when you close the tab.
Frequently Asked Questions
Every character you paste or type counts as one key depression, including spaces and punctuation — the same definition SSC's DEST uses.
It divides your character count by 5 (the standard characters-per-word convention) and then by an assumed typing speed, giving a rough time estimate at a few common WPM benchmarks.
No — counting happens entirely in your browser. Nothing you type or paste here is sent to a server or stored.
