How to count words and characters
- Paste or type your text into the input box.
- Read the live statistics: words, characters with and without whitespace, sentences, paragraphs, lines and reading time.
- Use Copy or Download to save a plain-text summary of the statistics.
Examples
Before
Great job 👍🏽
After
Words: 2 Characters: 11 Characters without whitespace: 9
Before
Version 2.0 ships in 3 days.
After
Words: 6 Characters: 28 Characters without whitespace: 23
Before
Crème brûlée
After
Words: 2 Characters: 12 Characters without whitespace: 11
When to use it
- Keep an essay, cover letter or application answer within a word limit.
- Check that a meta description, social post or ad headline fits a character limit.
- Estimate how long an article or newsletter takes to read.
- Compare the length of a translation with the source text.
- Count paragraphs and lines in a script, poem or product description.
How the counts work
Words are found with the browser’s built-in word segmentation (Intl.Segmenter). Numbers such as 2024 or 3.5 count as words; punctuation marks and emoji do not. In Vietnamese, each space-separated syllable counts as one word, which matches how word limits are usually applied to Vietnamese text.
Characters are counted as grapheme clusters, meaning what a reader perceives as one character. 👍🏽 is two code points and 👨👩👧 is five, but both count as 1 here. An “é” typed as a single precomposed letter and an “e” followed by a combining accent also give the same result. Other tools that count JavaScript string length or bytes may show higher numbers for the same text.
Paragraphs are blocks of text separated by at least one blank line, while lines count every line break. Sentence counts are an estimate: abbreviations such as “Dr.” or “etc.” and text without final punctuation can be split differently than a human would. Reading time assumes 200 words per minute, a common average for reading on screen.
Frequently asked questions
Why is the character count different from another site?
Many counters report JavaScript string length, which counts UTF-16 code units. An emoji can be 2 to 11 code units, so the numbers differ. This tool counts visible characters. If you need code units, code points or UTF-8 bytes, use the Unicode Normalizer.
Do hyphenated words and contractions count as one word?
Contractions like “don’t” are one word. Hyphenated compounds like “well-known” are split at the hyphen by the word segmentation rules, so they count as two words.
Are “characters without whitespace” the same as letters?
No. That figure removes spaces, tabs and line breaks but still includes punctuation, digits and emoji.
Is my text saved anywhere?
No. The counting happens in your browser and the text is not sent to a server. Closing or reloading the page clears it.