Type or paste your text and the counts update as you go: characters with spaces, characters without spaces, words, sentences and paragraphs. Enter a character limit, such as 160 for a text message or about 155 for a search result description, and see how many characters you have left.
Counting looks simple, but systems disagree about what a character is. A plain letter is one character everywhere. An emoji, or a letter with an accent built from two parts, may be one character on screen, two in one system and four bytes in another. This tool counts what a reader sees, so a single emoji adds one.
Line breaks are the other common difference. Some word processors leave them out of the character count, while web forms usually include them, often as two characters. When a count matters, as it does for an application form, paste into the form itself and trust the counter that sits beside it.
Short limits reward editing. Start by writing everything you want to say, then cut filler: 'in order to' becomes 'to', 'at this point in time' becomes 'now'. Remove adverbs and repeated words before you cut any fact.
Put the important words first. Search results and previews are cut off at the end, not the start, so a message that carries its point in the first half survives being trimmed. Check the count after each edit rather than at the end, which keeps you from cutting more than you need to.
Every letter, digit, punctuation mark, space and line break is one character. An emoji is counted as one character, even though some systems store it in more than one unit.
'With spaces' counts everything you typed, including spaces and line breaks. 'Without spaces' removes all spaces, tabs and line breaks before counting. Most forms and platforms use the 'with spaces' number.
A word is any run of characters separated by spaces or line breaks. 'well-known' counts as one word and 'cannot' counts as one. Two words with only a hyphen and no spaces, such as 'ice-cream', also count as one.
A sentence ends at a full stop, question mark or exclamation mark that is followed by a space or the end of the text. Text without a final mark still counts its last piece as a sentence. A decimal such as 3.5 does not end a sentence.
No. The counting happens in your browser. Nothing you type is sent to We.Inc or anyone else.
Related: Case converter, Readability checker, Meta tag generator.
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