Character Counter: Count Characters, Words and the Size of a Text

Character Counter: Count Characters, Words and the Size of a Text

Paste a text, and the counter shows at once how many characters it has (with and without spaces), how many words, sentences, lines and paragraphs, how many bytes it takes, how long it takes to read it, and which words you use most. You can also check the text against the limit of a post in Telegram, Instagram, Facebook, X, Threads, LinkedIn or YouTube. Everything happens in your browser: your text is not sent anywhere.

What is counted

• Characters are counted as a person sees them. A letter with an accent, an emoji with a skin tone, a flag or a family is one character. This is the number that the limits of the social networks mean, with the exceptions below.
• Characters without spaces do not count the spaces, tabs and line breaks.
• Words are counted by the rules of the Unicode standard, so Russian, German, Chinese and Japanese texts are counted too. A number is a word.
• Sentences end with a point, a question mark, an exclamation mark or an ellipsis. Lines are separated by a line break, and paragraphs by an empty line.
• Different words and the list of words used most ignore the case. The list takes the words of three letters or more.
• Time to read is counted for 200 words a minute and time to say for 130 words a minute, the usual speed of a talk. It is a guide.
• Pages are estimates: 500 words make a page of single-spaced text (A4, 12 pt), 250 words a double-spaced page, and 1,800 characters with spaces a standard page, which is used for Russian and Ukrainian texts.
• Numbers are counted wherever digits are written: the tool shows how many there are, their sum, the smallest and the largest, and the list (see below).

Characters, code points and bytes

A computer keeps a text as numbers, and "how long is a text" has several answers. The page shows them side by side:

• Characters: what you see. The text "é😀" has 2 characters.
• Code points: the numbers of the Unicode standard. "é" can be one code point or two (an "e" and an accent), and "👍🏽" is two (a hand and a skin tone).
• Bytes (UTF-8): the size of the text in a file or on the web. A Latin letter takes 1 byte, a Cyrillic letter 2, a Chinese character 3, an emoji 4. The Russian "Привет" is 6 letters and 12 bytes.
• Bytes (UTF-16): the size in the memory of JavaScript, Java and Windows. Most characters take 2 bytes, an emoji 4.

This is why different programs give different numbers for the same text:

The size of a text in bytes, KB and MB

The block "Size of the text" shows the size of the text as it is saved in a file in UTF-8 (the same as "Bytes (UTF-8)"), in bytes, kilobytes or megabytes, where 1 KB is 1,024 bytes. This is the number to use for a limit in bytes: a field of a database, a limit of a form or an API, the size of a message.

Limits of the social networks

Choose a network under the text box, and the bar shows how many characters are left or how far you are over. The limits are in the list: for example 4,096 for a Telegram message, 2,200 for an Instagram caption, 280 for a post on X. The networks count in their own way (X, for instance, counts an emoji as two), so use the bar as a guide. To add emojis to the post, take them from the emoji picker, which has the same limits and a table of them.

Numbers in the text

The block "Numbers in the text" finds every number that is written with digits, in the order of the text, and counts them: how many, the sum, the smallest and the largest. You can copy the list. It helps with the school task "find the numbers in the text", with a report in which you need the total of the figures, or with a text where you must check that all the numbers are there.

• A comma followed by exactly three digits is a sign of the thousands: 1,234 is 1234, and 1,234,567 is 1234567. Another comma is a decimal one: 3,5 is 3.5. A point is a decimal sign: 2.50 is 2.5. When both signs are in a number, the last one is the decimal sign: 1,234.56 and 1.234,56 are both 1234.56.
• A minus in front of a number makes it negative (-5), but not a hyphen in a date (2026-10-05 gives three numbers: 2026, 10 and 5) or in a word (A-1).
• Digits inside a word count too: in "5kg" the number is 5, and in "A4" it is 4.
• The numbers written in words ("twenty-one") are not found here. The number to words converter turns them into digits in its second mode, and also writes a number in words.

Limitations

• The pages are only a rough guide: a real page depends on the font, the size and the margins.
• The sentences are counted by the signs at the end, so an abbreviation like "e.g." or a number like 3.5 can be counted as the end of a sentence. Use it as a guide for long texts.
• For the Chinese and Japanese languages the words are found by a dictionary of the browser, and an old browser can count them a little differently.
• The text is not saved. Only your choice of the limit stays in the browser.
• To remove duplicate lines or to sort a list use the sort and shuffle lines tool, and to change the case of a text the case converter.