Character and Word Counter
Count characters, words, lines, sentences and bytes as you type, with a reading time estimate.
TextWhy characters are not enough
Almost every limit you meet while writing is expressed in characters: 160 for a meta description, 280 for a post, 60 for a page title. But a technical limit — a database column, a request header — is nearly always expressed in bytes, and the two numbers do not match.
Characters and bytes
In UTF-8 a Latin letter takes one byte, an accented letter two, an ideograph three, an emoji up to four. A hundred-character text can therefore take far more space, which is why a field "of 100 characters" sometimes rejects text that looks shorter. Both counts are shown here.
How words are counted
Counting words by splitting on spaces gets every interesting case wrong: apostrophes, hyphens, languages that do not use spaces at all. This tool uses the browser's own text segmentation, which recognises words the way a person would.
Reading time
The estimate assumes two hundred words per minute, the usual convention for general-audience text. It gives you an order of magnitude — useful for deciding whether an article has grown too long — not a precise measurement.
Frequently asked questions
Because in UTF-8 a character does not always take one byte: accented letters take two, emoji up to four. The byte count is the one that matters when the limit is technical.
No. Counting happens in your browser as you type: nothing is transmitted or stored.