Word counter
Count words, Unicode characters, lines, and paragraphs in your text, with a downloadable count report.
How it works & useful details
How to use this tool
Paste your text and count it. Download the report to keep the totals.
How the result is calculated
Words are runs of Unicode letters or numbers, with combining marks and internal straight or curly apostrophes. Hyphens split words. Text is NFC-normalized for counting; Chinese and Japanese runs are not dictionary-segmented.
Characters count Unicode code points, not visible grapheme clusters: a joined family emoji or a letter plus combining accent can count as several characters. Character counts preserve original line endings, so CRLF contributes two code points. Paragraphs are nonempty blocks separated by blank lines; whitespace-only blocks do not count.
Line tools normalize CRLF and CR to LF. A final newline represents an empty final line; empty input has zero lines.
Up to 500,000 UTF-16 code units per input. Text stays on your device.
About this tool
Word counter tallies words, Unicode characters, lines, and paragraphs in your text with a downloadable report. It is the tool for meeting a word limit or checking an article length before submitting.
Counting is Unicode-aware, so characters outside the basic alphabet are counted as single characters rather than as raw bytes. Everything runs locally and the text is never uploaded.
How to use it
- Paste or type the text.
- Review the word, character, line, and paragraph counts.
- Check how the counts react as you edit.
- Download the count report if you need a record.
Worked example
The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.
It was the fox's well-known trick.counts as 16 words, 80 characters (65 without whitespace), 3 lines, and 2 paragraphs. "fox's" is one word, because apostrophes inside a word are kept, while "well-known" counts as two, because hyphens split words. Different editors make different choices here, which is why word counts rarely agree exactly between tools.
Typical limits to check against
- Meta descriptions: about 150–160 characters before search results truncate them.
- Title tags: roughly 50–60 characters.
- Posts on X: 280 characters for standard accounts.
- Essays and applications: often counted in words, with the paragraph count as a quick structure check.
Characters are counted as Unicode code points. A single emoji like 👍 is one character, but a family emoji or a flag is built from several code points and counts as more. The UTF-16 code unit count is also shown, because JavaScript string lengths and some databases measure text that way.
Frequently asked questions
How are words counted?
Runs of letters and numbers separated by whitespace or punctuation count as words, which matches common word-processor behavior closely but not exactly.
Does emoji count as one character?
Characters are counted by Unicode code point, so some emoji made of several code points count as more than one.
What is the limit?
Up to 500,000 characters of text.
Does it count Chinese or Japanese words?
Those scripts do not separate words with spaces, and the counter does not use a dictionary to segment them. A run of CJK characters counts as one word. The character count is the more meaningful measure for such text.