Word and Character Counter

Count words and characters as you type

Essays, cover letters and application forms often come with a limit, such as 500 words or 1,000 characters, and short texts such as bios, product listings and page descriptions have to fit a set space. Type or paste your text into the box and the counts update as you go, so you can see how close you are and trim before you submit.

How to use it

1. Type in the box, or paste text from a document, an email or a web page.
2. Or open a .txt file of up to 5 MB, or drop one on the box. Word and PDF files aren’t opened here: copy their text and paste it instead.
3. Read the counts under the box. Clear empties it.

How each count works

• Words: anything between spaces that has a letter or a number in it. “Don’t”, “well-known” and “2026” are one word each; a dash or an ampersand on its own isn’t a word. That’s close to how word processors count, though they can differ by a word or two on dashes and symbols.
• Characters: every letter, number, space, punctuation mark and symbol, counted the way you see them, so an emoji or an accented letter is one character. Line breaks aren’t counted.
• Characters without spaces: the same, leaving out spaces and tabs.
• Sentences: a sentence ends at a period, question mark, exclamation mark or ellipsis, or at the end of a paragraph. Abbreviations such as “e.g.” or “Dr.” each add one, so treat this count as close rather than exact.
• Paragraphs: each line with something on it, as word processors count them. Blank lines between paragraphs don’t add any.

When another counter disagrees

Websites and forms don’t all count characters the same way: some count a line break as a character, and some count an emoji as two. If a form’s own counter differs from this one by a few characters, that’s usually why, so leave a little room under the limit.

Your text stays on your device

Counting happens in your browser as you type. Your text isn’t uploaded, saved by the page or added to its address. The box also has the browser’s spell check turned off, because some browsers’ enhanced spell check sends what you type to their maker. Press Clear when you’re done.

Long texts and other languages

The box takes long documents, from a short essay to a whole book, and the counts keep up as you edit. Languages written without spaces between words can only be split into words where there are spaces, so for them the character count is the one to rely on.