Character and Word Counter
Count characters, words, lines, paragraphs and bytes as you type, and see how often each character occurs — entirely in your browser.
Runs entirely in your browser. Nothing is uploaded, logged or stored.
Every character, counted
Type or paste something above and every character in it is listed here.
| Character | Code point | Count | Share of text |
|---|
Counts update as you type: characters for a field limit, words for a word count, bytes for a database column. Nothing is sent anywhere, so an unpublished draft stays unpublished.
How it works
Characters are counted as Unicode code points, so an accented letter counts once. Bytes are counted after UTF-8 encoding, which is what a VARCHAR limit and an HTTP payload actually measure: "é" is one character and two bytes.
A word is a run of non-whitespace characters. "state-of-the-art" counts once, and so does "don't". Japanese and Chinese have no spaces to split on, so text in those scripts is split into words by the Unicode dictionary segmentation your browser uses. Lines are line breaks plus one; paragraphs are blocks separated by a blank line.
Reading time is the word count at 200 words per minute. That is a common average for silent reading of ordinary prose, not a measurement of your text, and it is not given for Japanese or Chinese, where a pace in words per minute does not apply.
The frequency table counts every character, punctuation and spaces included, so the counts add up to the character total. Upper and lower case are separate unless you ask for them to be folded together, in which case the lower-case form is the one shown. Characters with nothing to show — a no-break space, a zero-width joiner, a stray control character — are named, and every row carries its code point.
Examples
| Case | Input | Result |
|---|---|---|
| A pangram | The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog. | 44 characters, 9 words |
Frequently asked questions
Why does my count differ from my word processor?
Because the definitions differ. Some counters treat a hyphenated compound as two words, some ignore numbers, some count a line break as a word boundary and some do not. The rules used here are written out above so you can tell which number you are looking at.
Which count matters for a meta description?
Characters, and search engines truncate on rendered width rather than a fixed count, so treat roughly 155 characters as a guide and not a rule.
Why is the space the most common character in my text?
Because it usually is. Ordinary prose runs at roughly one space for every five or six letters, so in most texts it comes first by a wide margin. The table counts what is there rather than what is interesting, which is also how a character you did not mean to type becomes visible.
How do I find an invisible character in my text?
Look for it by name in the frequency table. A no-break space pasted from a word processor, a zero-width space carried in from a web page, a byte order mark at the head of a file: each has a row, a name and a code point, which is usually the fastest way to find out why two strings that look identical are not equal.
Why do emoji count as more than one character sometimes?
Many emoji are a single code point, but a flag or a family is several joined together. This counts code points, so those show up as more than one.
Good to know
- Everything is counted in this page. Nothing you type is sent, logged or stored.
- A limit somebody else imposes may count something other than characters — bytes for a database column, UTF-16 units for some APIs. Both figures are here so you can match the one being applied to you.