Word Counter
Count words, characters, sentences, bytes and reading time as you type
About this tool
A live word and character counter with the numbers developers and writers actually need: words, characters with and without spaces, UTF-8 bytes (what your database column or API limit really measures), lines, sentences, paragraphs, and an estimated reading time at a typical 220 words per minute.
Characters are counted as Unicode code points, not UTF-16 units, so emoji and CJK text count the way a human would expect — and the separate byte count makes the difference visible: 日本語 is 3 characters but 9 bytes. That distinction is exactly what bites when a VARCHAR(255) column rejects a 200-"character" string.
Everything updates as you type, with nothing sent anywhere — safe for counting drafts of announcements, contracts, or anything else not ready for the world.
Frequently asked questions
- Why do the character and byte counts differ?
- Characters are Unicode code points; bytes are their UTF-8 encoding. ASCII letters are 1 byte each, most European accented letters 2, CJK characters 3, and emoji 4 (or more in sequences). Database limits, HTTP headers and many APIs measure bytes, not characters.
- How are words counted for languages without spaces?
- Word counting splits on whitespace, which undercounts unsegmented text in Chinese or Japanese. For those languages the character count is the more meaningful metric, which is why both are always shown.
- What counts as a sentence?
- A run of text ending in ., !, ?, or … followed by whitespace or the end of input. Abbreviations like "e.g." can inflate the count slightly — sentence counting is inherently heuristic.
- How accurate is the reading time?
- It divides the word count by 220 wpm, a common average for adult silent reading of general prose. Technical material with code reads slower; skimmable listicles read faster. Treat it as an order-of-magnitude estimate.