Word counter
Count words, characters, sentences and paragraphs, with correct counting for Chinese, Japanese and Korean text and for emoji. Runs in your browser.
Runs in your browser
Counting Chinese text
Most word counters split on spaces. Chinese does not use them, so a 200-character paragraph is reported as one word — a number that is not merely imprecise but meaningless.
This counter uses the browser’s own Intl.Segmenter, the same Unicode segmentation the
platform uses for double-click selection, so 中文 is counted by word rather than by
whitespace run. Mixed text works too: an English sentence with a Chinese clause in it is
counted correctly on both sides.
The CJK characters figure is counted separately, because that is the number Chinese publishers, universities and platforms actually specify. A 800字 requirement means 800 characters, not 800 words.
Characters, code points, and what you see
Three different numbers can all claim to be “the character count”:
For the string 👩🚀 | Count | Why |
|---|---|---|
UTF-16 code units ("👩🚀".length) | 5 | What JavaScript reports by default |
Code points ([..."👩🚀"].length) | 3 | Two emoji plus a zero-width joiner |
| Graphemes | 1 | What a reader sees, and what this page counts |
The counter above reports graphemes, which is why an emoji, an accented character typed as a base plus a combining mark, and a Hangul syllable each count as one.
Character limits on other systems are usually counted differently. Twitter/X counts most
CJK characters as two, SMS switches from a 160-character GSM limit to 70 characters as
soon as one non-Latin character appears, and a database VARCHAR(255) may mean 255 bytes
or 255 characters depending on the engine.
Reading time
The estimate assumes 220 words per minute for alphabetic text and 350 characters per minute for CJK — mid-range figures for silent reading of ordinary prose. Read it as an order of magnitude, not a measurement: technical material with code in it runs considerably slower, and skimming runs several times faster.
Your data stays here
Everything is counted in your browser as you type. Nothing is uploaded — which matters if what you are counting is an unpublished draft.