Word and character count
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Paste text and get characters, words, lines, bytes and reading time at once. Emoji and CJK are counted the way a reader would count them.
Input
Characters0
Output
Manuscript pages0.0 pp.
- Without spaces
- 0
- Words
- 0
- Lines
- 0
- Paragraphs
- 0
- UTF-8 bytes
- 0
- Reading time
- —
Common length limits
| X (a post) | 280 | 280 left |
| Meta description | 155 | 155 left |
| Page title | 60 | 60 left |
| Manuscript page (400 ji) | 400 | 400 left |
Related tools
All tools- Full-width / half-width converterConvert Japanese text between full-width and half-width, one character class at a time.
- Line toolsRemove duplicate and blank lines, sort, trim and number a list — in one pass.
- JSON formatter & validatorPretty-print, minify, sort keys — and point at the exact line that broke.
- CSV ⇄ JSON converterCSV and JSON, both ways — quoted commas and line breaks included.
Highlights
- Emoji count as one character
- Many counters report a flag emoji as 4 characters and an astral CJK character as 2, because they count UTF-16 code units. This counts graphemes, the units a person sees.
- Word counts that work in Japanese
- Splitting on whitespace treats a whole Japanese paragraph as one word. Segmenting on real word boundaries gives a meaningful number in either language.
- Text is never uploaded
- Nothing you paste is sent anywhere, so unpublished writing and internal documents are fine to use.
How to use it
Paste your text
Paste into the box or type straight into it. The sample button fills in an example if you just want to try it.
Read the figures
The count updates as you type. The large figure is characters, the one beside it is manuscript pages (400-character sheets, the Japanese submission unit), and the finer numbers sit underneath.
Check it against a limit
Common limits — tweets, meta descriptions and the like — are listed with how much room is left. Anything over the limit shows the overshoot in red.
Reading the numbers
- With or without spaces?
- Post limits (X and similar) count spaces; manuscript length is usually quoted without them. If a submission specifies which one it means, follow that.
- Why are manuscript pages fractional?
- It is the raw 400-characters-per-page figure. Rounding 2.3 up to 3 hides how much is actually missing.
- What is the byte count for?
- Database column limits and filename limits are usually measured in bytes, not characters. Japanese characters are typically 3 bytes each in UTF-8.
- Where does reading time come from?
- 240 words per minute for English, 500 characters per minute for Japanese — mid-range figures for silent reading. Reading aloud or closely is slower.
- How words are counted in Japanese
- Splitting on spaces does not work for Japanese, so word boundaries are estimated. A sentence with no spaces in it still comes back with a word count. English inside a Japanese sentence is counted as ordinary words. Being an estimate, proper nouns and coinages the model has not seen can be split differently than you would.
- Lines versus paragraphs
- Lines counts newline characters; paragraphs counts blocks separated by blank lines. A single long sentence wrapped across three lines on screen is still one line, because what is counted is the newlines in the text rather than the visual layout — which is what you want when measuring manuscript length.
- The full-width and half-width split
- Full-width covers Japanese characters and full-width punctuation; half-width covers ASCII letters, digits and punctuation. Some services count a full-width character as two and a half-width as one. Where a submission specifies that scheme, work it out by hand from this breakdown — it is not the same as the character count shown.
Questions
- Is there a length limit?
- None by design. Several hundred thousand characters work fine, though typing may feel less immediate on a modest device.
- Is my text stored?
- No. It lives in the page and disappears when you close the tab. Nothing is sent anywhere.
- Why does Word give a different number?
- Word counts English-style words by default and keeps a separate character count for CJK, and implementations differ on newlines and spaces. Check which figure you are comparing.
- Does it work on a phone?
- Yes — the input grows with the screen.
- Emoji and rare characters count as two elsewhere.
- Here they count as one. Skin-toned emoji and some rare CJK characters are stored as two to four internal units, and a naive count reports that number. This tool counts by grapheme cluster — the unit a person sees as one character — so the figure matches what is on screen. That difference explains most disagreements with other counters.
- I am submitting to a word limit. Which number do I use?
- Whichever the guidelines describe. A "40 characters by 30 lines" brief means manuscript pages; "under 2000 characters" means the character count; with nothing specified, the count excluding spaces is the safe default. ⚠️ If the recipient counts in Word, expect a small discrepancy — leave margin when you are near the limit.
- Can I count only part of the text?
- Paste only that part. Everything in the box is counted, so for per-chapter figures, swap the contents chapter by chapter. Nothing you paste leaves your device or survives closing the tab, so working drafts are safe to drop in.
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