Word & Character Counter

What does it count?

Characters with and without spaces, words, sentences, paragraphs, lines, and the average word length — updating as you type.

How is a word defined?

Any run of non-whitespace, so text is split on spaces and line breaks. A hyphenated compound counts as one word, "don't" counts as one, and a standalone numeral counts as a word. That is the same convention most word processors use, which keeps the count comparable.

Why do characters-with-spaces and characters-without differ by more than I expect?

Because every whitespace character counts, not just the spaces you see between words: line breaks, tabs and any trailing space at the end of a line are all in the first number and absent from the second. Pasted text often carries more of these than it appears to.

How are sentences detected?

By counting full stops, question marks and exclamation marks followed by whitespace or the end of the text. Abbreviations like "e.g." and decimal points inflate the count, since the tool has no way to know they are not sentence endings.

What separates paragraphs from lines?

A paragraph is a block separated by a blank line; a line is anything ending in a single line break. A poem with no blank lines is many lines and one paragraph — which is usually the distinction you want when a submission specifies one or the other.

Which count do platforms actually enforce?

Characters, almost always — and usually including spaces. Social posts, meta descriptions and form fields tend to cap characters rather than words, so that is the number to watch when writing to a limit. Word counts are more common in academic and editorial contexts.

Does it count emoji as one character?

Not necessarily. Many emoji are stored as more than one code unit, and combined ones such as skin-tone or family sequences count as several. A platform may count them differently again, so leave headroom when writing close to a limit with emoji in the text.

Is my text uploaded?

No. Counting happens in your browser as you type; nothing is transmitted or stored.