Word & Character Counter

What it measures

This counter is for anyone working to a stated length: a 500-word essay, a 160-character message, a form field with a hard cap. It answers one question — how long is this text under one documented rule — and it shows the rule, so you can tell whether it matches the one your marker, editor or platform uses. It runs entirely in your browser and sends nothing to a server.

The exact counting rules

The script does three things. It trims whitespace from both ends of your text, splits what is left on runs of whitespace, and counts the pieces. Separately it takes the length of the untrimmed text.

1. What separates words. Any run of whitespace, of any length, separates two words: a space, a tab, a line break, a no-break space, or an ideographic space. Two spaces between words still produce one split, not an empty word.
2. What counts as one word. Anything with no whitespace in it. So well-known, and/or, don't, 2026, 50% and a@b.com are each one word — and a dash with spaces around it is also one word.
3. Empty input. If the text is empty, or contains only whitespace, the word count is 0 rather than 1.
4. Spaces and line breaks are characters. The character total is the length of the raw text box value, so every space, tab and line break is included — including the spaces before the first word and after the last one, which the word count ignores.
5. Characters are UTF-16 code units. That is what JavaScript reports as a string's length. Ordinary Latin, Greek, Cyrillic, Arabic, Hebrew and most CJK characters count as 1 each. Characters outside the first 65,536 code points count as 2 — most emoji, for example. An emoji built from several joined parts counts every part: 👍 is 2, and 👨‍👩‍👧 is 8, because it is three people joined by two invisible joiner characters.
6. Accents depend on how they were typed. If é arrives as the single precomposed character it counts as 1. If it arrives as a plain e followed by a combining acute accent — which some keyboards and some macOS text produce — it counts as 2, even though it looks identical. Nothing is normalised first.
7. No rounding and no cap. Both totals are whole numbers printed as they are, and the code sets no maximum text length.

Worked examples

In the first column ␣ marks a space. These results come from the counting function itself.

Length limits worth knowing

Only a few length limits are genuinely fixed. These are defined in the GSM specifications for text messages; the search-result figure is a display convention, not a rule.

This tool counts UTF-16 code units, not GSM septets, so treat the SMS rows as a guide and check the final message in the app that sends it. Other platform caps change often enough that the limit printed beside the field you are typing into beats any published number.

Common mistakes

• Assuming a character limit excludes spaces. Most do include them, and this counter always does. If a form rejects text that looks short enough, spaces are the usual reason.
• Pasting from a word processor and expecting the same word count. Different programs disagree about hyphenated compounds, numbers, footnotes, captions and headings.
• Counting a draft that still has double spaces, a trailing blank line or an invisible no-break space pasted from a web page.
• Editing the text and reading the old numbers. Press the count button again; nothing recalculates on its own.
• Treating emoji as one character each when planning a message length. They almost never are.

Limits

It reports two numbers and nothing else. There is no sentence, paragraph, line or unique-word count, no characters-without-spaces figure, no reading-time estimate, and no spelling, grammar or style check. It does not detect the language of the text or adjust its rules for it.

It cannot count words in writing systems that do not put spaces between words, such as Chinese, Japanese and Thai; a whole run of such text counts as one word, although the character total is still correct. The copy button uses the browser clipboard API, which some browsers block; if that happens you get a message asking you to copy manually. The download button saves the box contents as a UTF-8 plain text file named text.txt.

Questions

Reviewed October 1, 2026. Calculation methods and corrections