Word limits are everywhere. An essay has one, a meta description has one, a social post has a hard one that cuts off without warning, and an application form may have one you only discover after submitting. Counting by hand is slow and inaccurate, which is a poor combination for something you may need to check repeatedly.
What it counts
Words, characters, sentences and an estimate of reading time. Characters come in two versions, with and without spaces, because the difference matters: most platforms count with spaces and some count without, and a meta description limit of 155 characters usually means the version including them.
Sentences are counted by punctuation, and reading time is derived from the word count at a typical reading speed of two hundred to two hundred and fifty words a minute. Treat that last figure as a guide. It is accurate for ordinary prose and optimistic for dense material, because technical writing slows people down.
Where the useful thresholds are
Several limits are worth knowing rather than checking each time. A meta description is usually around 155 to 160 characters before search engines truncate it. A page title is generally kept under about 60 characters, and anything longer gets cut in results. A short social post sits comfortably under 280 characters, and a longer one needs a different approach.
Knowing these means you can work to them directly instead of drafting freely and then discovering the problem.
Words are not quite what they seem
A word count treats hyphenated forms one way or another depending on the tool, and it counts numbers as words even when they look like single tokens. If a specific institution or client has a formal definition, it is worth checking their convention rather than assuming. The discrepancies only matter when you are right at a boundary.
Nothing is kept
The counting happens locally in the browser. That matters when the text is an unpublished proposal, a draft article, or something a client has not seen yet. Nothing is transmitted, so there is no copy of your work sitting on a server you did not choose.
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Why two counters disagree
Word counts vary slightly between tools, and knowing why prevents a lot of pointless argument. The main differences are how numbers and abbreviations are treated, whether a hyphenated compound counts as one word or two, and whether words in headings and lists are counted. Microsoft Word counts numerals as words, and most web counters do too, but a hyphenated phrase can go either way depending on the implementation.
The second common cause of disagreement is counting from a document rather than from plain text. A paragraph mark, a footnote reference or a caption included in the selection will be counted by some tools and ignored by others.
None of this matters when you are comfortably inside a limit. It matters when you are exactly on the boundary, and the sensible response then is to use the same tool your institution or client uses, since their definition is the one that counts.
The character counts are more reliable than the word counts, because a character is unambiguous. If you need to be certain of fitting a meta description or a social post, that is the number to trust.