Word & Character Counter
Count characters, words, sentences, paragraphs, lines and bytes as you type. Check a length limit, see reading time and the most frequent words.
Some platforms and programming languages measure text length in UTF-16 code units. An emoji such as 👍 then counts as 2, and some emoji count as more.
Length limit
Enter a limit to see how much room is left.
Most frequent words
| # | Word | Count | Share of all words |
|---|
No words to show yet.
Upper and lower case are treated as the same word. The share is the word's count divided by the total number of words.
Notes
- Counts follow the Unicode text rules built into your browser. A specific website, app or assignment can use its own rules, for example for links, emoji, line breaks or bytes, so its count can differ. Check the requirement you need to meet.
- Characters are counted as you see them, so an accented letter or an emoji with a skin tone counts as one character. Words in Chinese, Japanese and Thai, which are written without spaces, are found with the word segmentation of your browser and can differ from a dictionary or a person's count.
- Reading and speaking times are rough estimates. Actual times depend on the reader, the speaker and the text.
- Your text is processed in your browser and is not sent to LeedyBox. It is not saved, so it is gone when you close or reload the page.
How to use
- Type or paste your text into "Your text". The counts, time estimates and word table update as you type; with a very long text they update shortly after you pause, and "Counting…" may appear while the counting runs.
- To check a length limit, enter a number under "Limit" or click one of the presets (160, 280, 500 or 2200). Under "What to count", keep "Characters" or choose "Characters without spaces", "UTF-8 bytes" or "Words". The bar and the status line turn red once the text goes over the limit.
- Under "Most frequent words", see up to ten of the most used words, how often each appears and its share of all words. "Ignore words shorter than (characters)" starts at 2, so one-character words are hidden; raise it to hide short words such as "of" and "the", or set it to 1 to include one-character words.
- Click "Copy statistics" to copy the counts and the reading and speaking times as plain text, for example to paste into a report; when a limit is set, the limit and its status are added. Your text and the word table are not copied. "Clear" empties the text box.
Frequently asked questions
What counts as a word?
Words are found by your browser's Unicode word segmentation, and only segments with letters, digits or ideographs are counted; punctuation, symbols and spaces on their own are not. In current browsers, "don't", "3.14" and "1,000" each count as one word, while "well-known" counts as 2, "state-of-the-art" as 4, and a time such as 12:30 or an email address such as name@example.com as 2.
Why is my word count different from my word processor?
Some word processors and websites count every run of text between spaces as one word. They count "well-known", 12:30 or a web address that starts with https:// as a single word where this counter finds two or more, and they may count a lone dash or "&" between spaces as a word, which this counter skips. For ordinary prose the difference is usually small; text with many hyphens, numbers, links or code differs more.
Do spaces and line breaks count as characters?
Yes. "Characters" includes spaces, tabs and line breaks, and each line break counts as one character and one UTF-8 byte: the browser hands each line break in the text box to the tool as a single LF character, even when the text comes from Windows, where text files often use two (CR LF). "Characters without spaces" leaves out spaces, tabs, line breaks and other space characters such as non-breaking spaces, but still counts punctuation and emoji.
How are lines, paragraphs and sentences counted?
Lines are split at line breaks, so blank lines count and a line break at the very end adds an empty last line; a long line that only wraps on screen counts as one. Paragraphs are blocks of text separated by one or more blank lines (empty or containing only spaces), so lines separated by a single line break belong to the same paragraph. Sentences follow Unicode sentence rules, in which a line break ends a sentence: a heading or list item without end punctuation counts as a sentence, and so does each part of a sentence that is broken across lines, as in text copied from some PDFs. An abbreviation such as "Dr." followed by a capitalized word is usually counted as the end of a sentence.
Why do words like "the" and "and" top the list of most frequent words?
The list counts each word form separately, treating upper and lower case as the same, and does not skip common words. It does not merge forms such as "run" and "runs", and in Korean the same noun with different particles attached is listed separately. Set "Ignore words shorter than (characters)" to 4 to hide words of one to three letters; in Chinese and Japanese, where many words are a single character, set it to 1 to see them.
Does the 160 preset mean my text fits in one SMS?
Not necessarily. The presets only fill in common limit values, and the tool does not apply the rules of any particular service. Under the GSM standard used by many mobile networks, one SMS holds 160 characters only if all of them are in the GSM 7-bit alphabet, and symbols such as € take two places. With other characters, such as emoji, letters of most non-Latin scripts or some accented letters, the limit usually drops to 70 UTF-16 code units, which you can compare with the "UTF-16 code units" figure; longer texts are sent in several parts that each hold a little less.
Will I get the same counts in every browser?
The tool uses Intl.Segmenter, which is built into current browsers, so they give the same or very similar results, although word and sentence boundaries can shift slightly between browsers and browser versions, more often in Chinese, Japanese or Thai text, which has no spaces between words. Some older browsers without Intl.Segmenter can still run the tool with simpler rules: characters are counted as Unicode code points, words as text between spaces, and sentences by end punctuation and blank lines, so the counts are less accurate, especially for emoji and for Chinese, Japanese or Thai text.