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Word and Character Counter

Counts words, characters, UTF-8 bytes, lines, sentences and paragraphs, and estimates reading time.

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How to use this tool

  1. Paste or type the text.
  2. Select Count.
  3. Compare the character count with the byte count. If they differ, the text is not plain ASCII and a byte-based length limit will bite sooner than you expect.

What word counter does

Most word counters stop at words and characters. The count that causes trouble is the third one: bytes. A database column declared as VARCHAR(255) may mean 255 bytes rather than 255 characters, and a string of accented or non-Latin text uses two, three or four bytes per character in UTF-8. A value that looks well within the limit can be rejected at insert time for that reason alone.

This page reports both, alongside lines, paragraphs and sentences. The sentence count is deliberately simple — a full stop followed by a space ends a sentence — so an abbreviation such as "e.g." inflates it. The reading time uses 200 words a minute, the usual figure for silent reading of ordinary prose, and is a guide rather than a measurement.

Frequently asked questions

Because UTF-8 uses one byte for ASCII characters and two, three or four for everything else. An accented letter is two bytes, most CJK characters are three, and an emoji is four. A column limit measured in bytes will therefore reject text that looks well inside the character limit.

Rough, on purpose. A full stop, question mark or exclamation mark followed by whitespace ends a sentence, so abbreviations such as "e.g." and initials in a name each add a false sentence. It is a useful shape of the text, not a measurement.

From 200 words per minute, which is the figure usually quoted for silent reading of ordinary prose. Technical writing, tables and code all read much slower, so treat it as a floor rather than an estimate for anything dense.