Text Tools
Word and character counting, manuscript fee estimates and other text utilities that run entirely in your browser.
1 tool
Text tools here answer questions that look trivial until something depends on the answer: how long is this, exactly? Word count, character count, sentence count and reading time are four different measurements, and the one a platform enforces is rarely the one a word processor displays.
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About Text Tools
The disagreement is not a bug. Counting methods differ in what they treat as a word (hyphenated compounds, stand-alone numbers, CJK text), in whether they include markup, and in whether they normalise Unicode first. Paste the same paragraph into three editors and you can get three answers within a few percent of each other — and for a limit measured in characters, a few percent is the difference between accepted and rejected.
Character counting conceals its own complexity: a code point, a grapheme cluster and a UTF-8 byte are three different numbers for the same visible text. An emoji is one grapheme and four bytes; an accented letter may be one code point or two depending on how it was typed. Where a platform expresses its limit in bytes, the byte count is the number that decides.
Frequently asked questions
How do you count words?
By splitting on whitespace and keeping subsequences that contain at least one letter or digit, which is the convention most word processors and editorial style guides follow. Punctuation attached to a word does not create a second word, hyphenated compounds count once, and a stand-alone number counts as a word. Some tools instead count every space-delimited token regardless of content, which inflates the total for documents containing symbols or markup. The method matters most for technical text, where a few percent of difference is routine.
Do you count CJK characters as words?
CJK text has no spaces, so whitespace splitting reports implausibly low counts for it. Where a run of Han, Hiragana or Katakana characters is detected, each character is counted individually instead, which matches how those languages are usually measured for length. Note that this is a character-based approximation of a native length estimate rather than true linguistic segmentation — a real Japanese word count needs a morphological analyser, and no browser-side counter does that.
Which limit matters for social posts, meta descriptions and SMS?
Each platform measures something different, so match the tool to the unit. Most social bios measure grapheme clusters, which is why an emoji costs one while a flag emoji costs two. Meta descriptions and ad copy are measured in characters, with roughly 155 characters as the point where search results truncate rather than a hard limit. SMS is measured in GSM-7 septets, and a single character outside the basic alphabet forces the whole message into UCS-2, cutting the per-segment budget from 160 characters to 70.
Does punctuation count?
In character counts, yes — every character counts, including spaces and punctuation, because that is what the platform's counter sees. In word counts, punctuation attached to a word does not increase the total, and a punctuation mark standing alone is not a word. Wherever a count is used for billing or against a hard limit, use the character figure, since it is the one that cannot be disputed.
Is my text uploaded?
No. Counting happens entirely in your browser and the text never leaves the page. That is deliberate, because the text people paste into a word counter is often an unpublished draft, a contractual clause or a customer email. The tool also keeps working with the network disconnected, which is a quick way to verify the claim rather than taking it on trust.
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This space is reserved for a sponsor. Every tool on this site stays free and runs locally in your browser.