Character and Word Counter

How it works

Paste your text into the left pane; the report is built immediately and updates as you type. It comes in two blocks. The first is the breakdown: characters with spaces, characters without spaces, words, sentences, lines, paragraphs and the longest word in the text. Words are found with Unicode letter rules rather than a plain A-Z test, so accented and non-Latin words are not cut in half, and a hyphenated or apostrophised word such as 'well-known' or 'doesn't' counts as one word rather than two. A sentence ends at a full stop, question mark, exclamation mark or ellipsis only when a space or the end of the text follows it, which stops a date like 12.07.2026 from being read as three sentences. Paragraphs are blocks separated by a blank line, so a single line break inside a paragraph does not start a new one. The second block takes your character count including spaces and measures it against three common limits, saying either how much room is left or how many characters you have to cut. Nothing is uploaded — the counting happens inside your browser, so an unpublished draft or a confidential letter is safe to paste.

This tool is also known as character counter, word count, count characters online, how many words, characters without spaces.

What is Character?

A character is a single unit of written text: a letter, a digit, a punctuation mark — and a space is one too. So is a line break, invisible though it is, which is why text pasted out of a document can break a limit that looked comfortable on screen. This counter measures Unicode code points, so an accented letter such as é counts once even though UTF-8 stores it in two bytes, and a plain emoji counts once while a flag or family emoji counts as the several code points it is built from. Not every system counts the same way, and SMS is the usual exception.

What is Meta description?

A meta description is the short summary a search engine prints under the page title in the results list. It does not decide the ranking, but it does decide the click: readers choose between results largely on those two lines. Search engines cut the text at a certain pixel width rather than at a fixed character count, which is why 155-165 characters is treated as a practical ceiling rather than a rule. Stopping well short is a loss of its own — a 100-character description leaves space empty that could have carried a reason to click.

What is the difference between word count and character count?

Character count measures the physical space text occupies; word count measures how much there is to read. They are not interchangeable, and different people ask for different ones. Anything with a fixed field counts characters: form inputs, SMS, social posts, meta descriptions, database columns. Anything that commissions or grades writing counts words: essays, articles, content orders and translation quotes. An English word averages around five characters plus its space, so a 500-word article lands near 3,000 characters — a useful conversion when the brief gives you one number and the submission form asks for the other. The report carries both figures, so you can answer whichever question is actually being asked.

With spaces, or without?

Places that impose a limit do not all mean the same thing by it. Application forms, abstract fields and per-character translation rates usually count characters without spaces; social networks, SMS gateways and meta descriptions count everything you type, spaces included.

The gap is not small. In ordinary English prose the spaces are roughly a sixth of the total, so on a 1,000-character limit that is about a paragraph of writing. The report gives both figures, which means you can read the line the rule actually refers to instead of guessing.

Common character limits

The comparison block checks the first three of the limits below, because they are the ones people arrive here to check. An X post counts links towards the 280 rather than letting them through free.

The SMS line deserves a caveat. One message holds 160 characters only while every character fits the GSM-7 set; a single emoji, curly quote or accented letter switches the message to UCS-2 and the allowance for one message drops to 70. With a meta description the real constraint is pixel width rather than character count, so 155-165 is a practical target rather than a hard rule — and coming in far under it wastes space that could have earned the click.

• X post → 280 characters, links included
• One SMS → 160 characters, or 70 once a non-GSM character appears
• Meta description → 155-165 characters
• Page title → around 60 characters

How many words is 5,000 characters? A conversion table

There is no exact answer, because no single factor turns characters into words — the text itself decides. The table below rests on one stated assumption: in ordinary English prose a word takes about 6 characters including the space that follows it, which is roughly five letters plus the gap. Short words and heavy punctuation push the word count up; long technical or legal vocabulary pushes it down, so treat every figure as an estimate within about 15 per cent either way.

The figures count characters with spaces. Counting without spaces removes roughly a sixth, so 3,000 characters without spaces is nearer 600 words than 500. When a limit is handed to you, the first job is working out which of the two it means: reading the with-spaces figure against a without-spaces limit makes you cut text you did not need to cut, and the reverse quietly puts you over.

So use the table as an estimate and the report as the answer. It tells you how close you are to the length an assignment, a job listing or a content brief asks for; the exact number appears the moment you paste the text into the left pane.

• 100 characters → about 15-18 words
• 500 characters → about 80-90 words
• 1,000 characters → about 165-180 words
• 1,500 characters → about 250-270 words
• 3,000 characters → about 500-545 words
• 5,000 characters → about 830-900 words
• The other way round: a 500-word article → about 3,000 characters with spaces

Frequently asked questions

How do I find out how many characters my text is?

Paste the text into the left pane. The count with spaces and the count without spaces are the first two lines of the report, and both update as you type.

A form gives me a character limit — which number do I use?

It depends on what the form means. Most official forms count characters without spaces; when the wording does not say, go by the count with spaces and leave yourself margin, because that is the stricter of the two.

How are emoji and accented letters counted?

A plain emoji counts as one character, but emoji built from several parts — flags, families, skin-tone variants — count as more than one, because they are several code points joined together. An accented letter counts as one character here even though it takes two bytes in UTF-8.

Is my text stored anywhere?

No. The counting runs inside your browser; what you paste is never sent to a server and disappears when you close the tab.

How many words is 5,000 characters including spaces?

Around 830 words, and up to about 900 if the writing is plain and the words are short. The assumption behind that figure is roughly 6 characters per word including the space after it. Long technical vocabulary brings the count nearer 700. Paste the text into the left pane for the exact number rather than the estimate.

How many words is 100 characters?

About 15 to 18 words, which is a single sentence. At that length the estimate is at its least reliable: one long compound word or one URL shifts the answer by several words, because the average has too few words to smooth out. Short limits are worth measuring rather than estimating.