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Character & Word Counter
Real-time text statistics: characters (with and without spaces), words, lines, sentences, paragraphs, and size in bytes (UTF-8).
This tool counts characters, words, lines, sentences, and paragraphs in real time as you type or paste text, and also shows the size in bytes under UTF-8 encoding.
What gets counted
- Characters with and without spaces — shown separately so you can check against limits like meta descriptions or tweets.
- Words — split on spaces and the punctuation between them.
- Sentences and paragraphs — split on terminal punctuation (. ! ?) and blank lines, respectively.
- UTF-8 byte size — useful when a limit is measured in bytes rather than characters (non-Latin text and emoji take more than one byte each).
Common uses
- Checking a meta description or title's length before publishing so it fits the search result limit.
- Keeping text within a character limit for an assignment, bio, or product description.
- Getting quick text stats without opening a text editor with a word-count panel.
Things to keep in mind
One visual "character" (like an emoji with a skin-tone modifier or a country flag) can be made of several Unicode code points and count differently depending on the counting method.
Social media and form limits sometimes count bytes or grapheme clusters rather than characters — check against this tool's byte counter if that matters.
Article about this tool: Counting characters and words: why it's not always trivial
Frequently asked questions
What statistics are exactly calculated?
The tool counts characters with and without spaces, words, lines, sentences, paragraphs, and the text size in UTF-8 encoded bytes.
Why does the byte count differ from the character count?
In UTF-8, a simple Latin character takes one byte, but a Cyrillic character, an accented letter, or an emoji can take two to four bytes, so text with many multi-byte characters will have a byte count noticeably higher than its character count.
Is my text sent to a server to be analyzed?
No, all calculations happen in real time in your browser in JavaScript, nothing is transmitted online.
Why is word counting inaccurate for languages without spaces?
In Chinese, Japanese, or Thai, words are traditionally not separated by spaces — the boundary is defined by grammar and context. Space-based counting for these languages either yields a single "word" for the whole text or loses its meaning — a separate segmentation algorithm is needed.
Why does a single emoji sometimes count as several characters?
Emoji with a skin-tone modifier or country flags are made up of several Unicode code points combined into one visible grapheme cluster. A naive count by code point can count such a visually single character as two, three, or more.