Character and Word Counter
Type or paste text to see its length. Counts update as you type and nothing is uploaded.
- Characters
- 0
- Without spaces
- 0
- Visible characters
- 0
- Words
- 0
- Lines
- 0
- Sentences
- 0
- UTF-8 bytes
- 0
- Reading time
- 0 min
What this tool does
Different limits apply in different places: meta descriptions are measured in characters, article submissions and school essays in words, database columns in bytes, and form fields in characters including or excluding spaces. This page reports all of them at once so you can see when a text is about to exceed a limit.
Method
Two character counts are given because they answer different questions. Characters is the number of Unicode code points — the figure a database column or a hard character limit is usually enforced against. Visible characters counts what you actually see: a family emoji, a flag, or a letter with a combining accent is one code point sequence but one visible character, and this is the number word processors show. They are identical for plain English and differ only once emoji, flags or combining marks appear. Words are runs of letters or digits. Lines follow the actual newline characters, including Windows line endings. Bytes are measured by encoding the text as UTF-8, which is what most storage limits and APIs actually enforce — this is the number that surprises people with Vietnamese, Thai or emoji text, because those characters occupy two to four bytes each.
Example
| Text | Chars | Words | Bytes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Hello world | 11 | 2 | 11 |
| Tiếng Việt | 10 | 2 | 14 |
| café ☕ | 6 | 1 | 9 |
Why the numbers disagree with your editor
Word processors and this tool often report different counts for the same text, and neither is wrong — they count different things. A word processor typically strips markup, ignores line breaks, and may exclude trailing punctuation; a raw counter counts what is there. If you are checking against a limit, check which definition the limit uses before trusting either number.
| Measure | What counts | Typical use |
|---|---|---|
| Characters (code points) | Every Unicode code point | Hard storage limits |
| Visible characters (graphemes) | What renders as one character | Word processors, design tools |
| Characters without spaces | Code points minus whitespace | Some form validators |
| Words | Runs of letters or digits | Reading time, word-count limits |
| UTF-8 bytes | Encoded byte length | Database columns, headers, API limits |
Words, and what a word is
A word here is a run of letters or digits, so “don't” and “2026” each count as one word and a standalone hyphen counts as none. This is a practical definition that matches how most limits are enforced, not a linguistic one: an abbreviation like “e.g.” counts as two words, and a hyphenated compound counts as two because the hyphen separates the runs.
Sentences
A sentence is a run of text ending in a full stop, question mark or exclamation mark, including the full-width forms used in East Asian punctuation. Abbreviations are not specially handled, so “e.g.” and “Dr.” can inflate the count. That limitation is stated rather than hidden: sentence segmentation without a language model is approximate, and a counter that guessed would be worse than one that is consistent.
Reading time
The estimate uses 200 words per minute, the conventional figure for adult prose. It is a heuristic: a page of code or dense technical text takes longer, and a list of short items takes less. Treat it as a comparison between documents rather than a measurement of a person.
Byte counts and emoji
UTF-8 uses one byte for ASCII, two or three for most other scripts, and four for characters above U+FFFF — which includes most emoji. A string that looks short can be several times longer in bytes. This is the number that matters when a system rejects input with a message about length: the limit is almost always bytes, not visible characters.
Frequently asked questions
How are words counted?
A word is a run of letters or digits, so “don’t” and “2026” each count as one word. Punctuation on its own does not count.
Why do character and byte counts differ?
One character can take more than one byte in UTF-8. Vietnamese and Thai letters usually take two or three bytes each, and emoji up to four, so the byte count is always at least the character count.
What counts as a sentence?
A run of text ending in a full stop, question mark or exclamation mark, including the full-width forms used in Asian punctuation. Abbreviations are not specially handled, so “e.g.” can inflate the count slightly.
What is the reading time based on?
A standard 200 words per minute for adult prose. It is an estimate, not a measurement.
Why do the two character counts differ?
They measure different things. “Characters” counts Unicode code points, which is what most hard limits are enforced against. “Visible characters” counts grapheme clusters — what you see on screen. A family emoji is 7 code points but 1 visible character; a flag is 2 code points but 1 visible character; é written as e plus a combining accent is 2 code points but 1 visible character. For plain English the two are the same number.
Is my text stored?
No. Counting happens in your browser and the text never leaves the page.
Go deeper
Longer explanations of the problems this tool solves:
Sources
- Unicode Standard, code points and composition of accented characters.
- RFC 3629, UTF-8, a transformation format of ISO 10646, for the byte counts.
Everything runs in your browser — nothing you type is uploaded.