Word Counter
Counts as you type: words, characters, sentences and reading time in one view.
Your text never leaves this device
One character, taken apart
A character you see as one can be several pieces inside the computer. It is one of the reasons counters disagree.
Counting for a specific limit
How this counts
- Words
- Runs of text separated by spaces or line breaks, so “well-known” and “don't” are one word each. The Unicode-rules figure splits at hyphens and also works for scripts written without spaces.
- Characters
- One for each character as people see it (grapheme clusters, Unicode UAX #29). An emoji such as 👨👩👧 is 1, however many pieces it is built from.
- Spaces
- Spaces, tabs and line breaks. “Without spaces” leaves all of them out.
- Line breaks
- A line break counts as 0, 1 or 2 characters, whichever you choose. It starts at 1.
- Sentences
- Unicode sentence boundaries: after a full stop, question mark or exclamation mark, and at line breaks.
- Paragraphs
- Lines that contain text. Blank lines are not counted.
- Reading and speaking time
- Words divided by a speed in words per minute. The speeds are assumptions you can change: they start at 200 for reading and 130 for speaking.
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Questions
Does the character count include spaces?
“Characters” includes spaces and line breaks. “Without spaces” leaves out spaces, tabs and line breaks. Both are shown side by side.
Why does another counter show a different number?
Usually because of line breaks, hyphenated words or emoji. Some tools count a line break as two characters, some split “well-known” into two words, and some count an emoji by its internal pieces instead of as one character. Open “How this counts” to switch the line-break rule.
Is my text uploaded or saved?
No. Counting happens in your browser. This site does not send your text to a server or store it, and it is gone when you close the page.
How is reading time worked out?
It is the word count divided by a reading speed. The starting value of 200 words per minute is an assumption, not a measurement of you, so set your own pace under “How this counts”.
Keep reading
- How X counts characters: emoji, links and the 280 limitX counts a weighted length, not characters: Latin letters count 1, Korean, Chinese and Japanese characters 2, every link 23 and each emoji 2. A table of examples counted with our tool and checked against twitter-text.
- Why a 161-character text costs two messagesOne SMS holds 160 GSM-7 characters, but split messages hold only 153 each, and a single emoji or curly quote drops the limit to 70. Tables of where the breaks fall, counted with our SMS tool.
- Characters, code points, bytes: why 👨👩👧 is 1, 5 or 18One emoji can be 1 character, 5 code points, 8 UTF-16 units or 18 bytes. What each number measures, a table of common cases counted four ways, and which one a length limit is likely to use.
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