Character & word counter
Count characters, words and lines in real time (with/without spaces).
A scholarship form says 500 words maximum. A meta description should stay near 155 characters. An SMS gateway rejects anything over 160 bytes. Each of those limits counts something different, and word processors do not always agree on the number. Paste your text here and all five counts appear at once, so you can check against whichever rule applies.
How it works
What each number means
The counts refresh as you type or paste — there is no button to press.
| Count | What it measures |
|---|---|
| Characters | Every character including spaces, tabs and line breaks |
| No spaces | Characters with all whitespace removed |
| Words | Chunks separated by one or more spaces |
| Lines | Number of line breaks plus one |
| Bytes | Size of the text when saved as UTF-8 |
Why bytes can be larger than characters
In UTF-8, plain English letters, digits and punctuation take one byte each, so a 200-character English sentence is usually 200 bytes. Accented letters take two, most CJK characters take three, and many emoji take four or more. If your limit comes from a database column, an SMS gateway or an API field, that limit is almost always in bytes — check the byte count, not the character count.
How words are counted
The counter trims the text, then splits on runs of whitespace. Hyphenated forms such as state-of-the-art count as one word, and don't counts as one. A trailing space does not create an extra word. Numbers and standalone symbols do count, so a line of bullet characters will raise the total.
Nothing leaves your browser
The counting runs entirely in the page. Your text is not uploaded anywhere, which makes it safe to paste a draft you have not published yet.
Terms explained
- Character
- A single unit of text as the browser sees it, including spaces, punctuation and line breaks.
- No spaces
- The character count after removing spaces, tabs and line breaks — the figure many academic limits use.
- Word
- A run of characters bounded by whitespace. Punctuation attached to a word does not split it.
- Byte
- The storage size of the text encoded as UTF-8. Non-Latin characters take more than one byte each.
- UTF-8
- The text encoding used by almost all modern websites and databases. It uses one to four bytes per character.
- Line
- A segment ending at a line break. An empty document counts as zero lines; a single line of text counts as one.
Frequently asked questions
Why does my word count differ from Microsoft Word?
Word processors apply their own rules to hyphens, footnotes, headers and text inside tables, and some count numbers differently. This tool uses the simple whitespace rule, which matches what most online forms and submission systems do. If a specific system enforces the limit, test your text against that system's own counter.
Does an empty text box count as one line?
No. An empty box reports zero lines. As soon as there is any content it reports one, and each additional line break adds one more, so a paragraph followed by a blank line and a second paragraph counts as three.
Which count should I use for a database column?
Use the byte count if the column is defined with a byte-based type, which is the common case in MySQL and PostgreSQL. A field declared as 255 will overflow well before 255 characters if the text contains accented letters, emoji or non-Latin script.
Is my text stored or sent anywhere?
No. All counting happens in your browser with JavaScript, and nothing is transmitted to a server. Closing or refreshing the page clears the box.
How are emoji counted?
Most single emoji count as one character but four bytes. Combined emoji built from several code points — flags, skin-tone variants, family sequences — may register as more than one character while looking like a single symbol on screen.
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