Understanding your text counts
A word count helps you check the size of a draft, while a character count is useful for fields with a length limit. Paste your text above and the results update when you type, paste, delete, or replace a selection. You do not need to submit the text or press a separate counting button.
Characters with and without whitespace
Characters includes spaces and tabs, but excludes line breaks. Without whitespace removes all whitespace before counting. The separate Spaces figure counts ordinary space characters only; it does not include tabs or newlines.
Modern browsers count visible character groups, so an accented letter or a combined emoji can count as one character even when it contains several Unicode components. Older browsers fall back to counting Unicode code points, which can give a higher result for combined characters.
How are words and sentences counted?
When available, the browser's built-in text segmentation identifies words and sentence boundaries. It can recognize word boundaries in languages that do not put a space between every word. Older browsers use whitespace to separate words and common sentence punctuation to estimate sentences.
Sentence counts are estimates. Abbreviations, initials, decimals, headings, and unusual punctuation can be interpreted differently. Hyphenated words and apostrophes may also be counted differently by another editor. For technical background, see MDN's text segmentation reference.
Lines and paragraphs are different
A line is separated by an explicit line break. Text wrapping onto another visual line because the text box is narrow does not add a line to the count. A final line break creates a final empty line, while completely empty input has zero lines.
Paragraphs are non-empty blocks separated by a blank line. Pressing Enter once within a paragraph adds a line, while leaving a blank line starts another paragraph. Extra blank lines do not create empty paragraphs. This distinction is useful when checking text copied from an editor or email.
Why might another site show a different count?
Some services count browser text units, encoded bytes, links, or emoji in their own way. Rich-text editors may also treat list items and formatting differently from plain text. The input limit on this page uses the browser's text-field length, which can count a complex emoji as several units.
Use these counts as a drafting aid, then check the destination's own counter when a limit matters. A character count does not measure how wide a headline will appear, and it does not guarantee how much text will fit in a search result or a printed layout.
Copying, clearing, and keeping your draft
Copy text copies the original text, including its spacing and line breaks. Clear empties the text box and resets the counts. Use example loads a small sample so you can see how lines and paragraphs differ.
This tool processes text locally and does not save a draft for you. Copy anything you need before clearing, reloading, or leaving the page. Once the tool has loaded, counting itself does not require another server request. To change capitalization, use Case Convert and check the result here.
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