- Characters
- 0
- Characters (no spaces)
- 0
- Words
- 0
- Lines
- 0
- Paragraphs
- 0
- Bytes (UTF-8)
- 0
- Bytes (Korean 2-byte)
- 0
How to use
- Type or paste your text into the box. Counting starts immediately, there is no button to press.
- Read the totals under the box. Characters are shown both with and without spaces, because essay portals and job applications use different rules.
- Keep editing. Your text is saved in this browser, so it is still there if you close the tab by accident.
- Press Clear when you are done to remove the text from the box and from the browser's storage.
What this word counter measures
Different places set limits in different units. A college application might allow 650 words, a meta description around 155 characters, a text message 160 characters, and a database column a fixed number of bytes. This tool shows all of these numbers at once so you do not need a separate tool for each rule.
- Characters counts every visible character, including spaces, but not line breaks.
- Characters (no spaces) leaves out spaces, tabs and line breaks. Many translation and publishing quotes are based on this number.
- Words counts groups of characters separated by whitespace.
- Lines and Paragraphs help when a form limits the number of lines or when you want to check the structure of an essay.
- Bytes shows how much storage the text needs, which matters for SMS gateways, APIs and database fields.
How characters are counted
Computers store text as code points, but people read graphemes, the characters you actually see. An emoji like 👍🏽 is made of two code points, and a family emoji can be seven. A simple program would report those as two or seven characters. This counter uses the browser’s built-in text segmentation to count what you see, so an accented letter, a flag or a skin-tone emoji each count as one character. If an older browser lacks that feature, the counter falls back to counting code points.
Example
Take the sentence “Hello world, again.” It has 19 characters, 17 characters without spaces, 3 words and 1 line. In UTF-8 it takes 19 bytes because every character is basic English. Add the Korean word “안녕” on a new line and the UTF-8 size grows by 7 bytes: 6 for the two Korean characters and 1 for the line break.
Edge cases worth knowing
Text copied from web pages sometimes contains non-breaking spaces or zero-width characters that you cannot see. Non-breaking spaces count as spaces, and zero-width characters are attached to the character next to them. If a count looks too high, paste the text into a plain-text editor first. Also remember that each site you submit to may apply its own rules, so leave a small margin under any strict limit.
Frequently asked questions
- Does this word counter send my text anywhere?
- No. Counting happens entirely in your browser with JavaScript. The text never leaves your device, which also means the tool keeps working if you lose your internet connection after the page has loaded.
- Why is my character count different from Microsoft Word or Google Docs?
- Most differences come from line breaks and emoji. This tool does not count line breaks as characters, and it counts an emoji such as a family or a flag as one character, the way you see it on screen. Some editors count the hidden parts of an emoji separately.
- How are words counted?
- A word is any run of characters between spaces, tabs or line breaks. Hyphenated words like "well-known" count as one word, and numbers count as words.
- What is the difference between lines and paragraphs?
- Every line break starts a new line. A paragraph is a block of text separated from the next block by at least one empty line.
- Why are there two byte counts?
- UTF-8 is the encoding used by almost every website and database, where an English letter is one byte and a Korean or Chinese character is three bytes. The second count follows the older Korean convention in which every non-English character takes two bytes, which some Korean forms still use for their limits.
- Is my text stored?
- Only in your own browser's local storage, so you can come back to it later. Nothing is stored on a server. Pressing Clear removes it. If your browser blocks storage, the counter still works; it simply will not remember your text.