Character count online, instantly — paste any text and watch live totals for characters (with and without spaces), words, lines, paragraphs, sentences, and raw UTF-8 bytes. Built-in progress bars show how close you are to the Twitter/X limit of 280, the SMS GSM-7 limit of 160, and the 78-character email subject sweet spot. Reading-time (200 wpm) and speaking-time (130 wpm) estimates help size blog posts, scripts, and podcast outlines. The top five most-frequent words, average word length, and longest word help spot filler and repetition. All processing happens in your browser — no upload.
Last updated: March 2026
Top 5 Most Frequent Words
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Frequently Asked Questions
Does a tweet count characters or bytes?
Twitter/X counts characters after Unicode NFC normalization, with one important twist — each glyph from the Basic Multilingual Plane counts as 1 unit, but characters from certain Chinese, Japanese, Korean and emoji ranges count as 2 units. The effective limit is 280 units for standard accounts (Blue subscribers get a higher cap). URLs are always shortened to a fixed 23-character t.co length regardless of the original URL size, so a 500-character link still burns only 23 units.
What counts as one SMS message?
A single SMS fits 160 characters using the GSM-7 encoding (7 bits per character). If any character requires the extended GSM-7 table (like the Euro sign, square brackets, or the tilde), it consumes two slots. Using UCS-2 encoding (needed for emoji or non-Latin scripts like Arabic, Hebrew, Thai, or CJK) drops the limit to 70 characters per segment. Longer messages are concatenated with a 6-byte UDH header, reducing each segment to 153 GSM-7 chars or 67 UCS-2 chars.
How are words counted?
Words are sequences of non-whitespace characters separated by whitespace — spaces, tabs, and newlines. Multiple consecutive spaces collapse to a single separator. Numbers, hyphenated compounds ("state-of-the-art"), and contractions ("don't") each count as a single word, matching Microsoft Word and Google Docs behavior. Note that in CJK text (Chinese, Japanese, Korean) there are no whitespace word boundaries, so the count approximates chunks of contiguous text rather than linguistic words. For those languages, rely on the character count instead.
Why do UTF-8 bytes differ from characters?
UTF-8 encodes each code point as 1 to 4 bytes. ASCII characters (A–Z, 0–9, basic punctuation) use 1 byte. Most accented Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic glyphs use 2 bytes. Most CJK ideographs use 3 bytes, and supplementary-plane characters like emoji, uncommon CJK extensions, and mathematical symbols use 4 bytes. Database varchar columns, HTTP headers, JWT tokens, and JSON payload sizes are measured in bytes, not characters — so the byte count is what actually affects storage, bandwidth, and API request limits.
How accurate are the reading and speaking time estimates?
Reading time uses 200 words per minute, the midpoint of the commonly cited 175–250 wpm silent-reading range for adults on screens. Speaking time uses 130 wpm, the typical pace for podcasts, audiobook narration, and conference talks — TED talks average around 150 wpm. Real numbers vary: dense technical content trends slower, conversational copy trends faster, and non-native readers typically sit at 100–150 wpm. Use the estimate as a starting point, then calibrate with your own test reads aloud.
Is my text sent anywhere?
No. All counting runs in your browser with vanilla JavaScript — no network request, no upload, no log. You can disconnect from the internet after the page loads and everything still works. Your text never leaves the device. This matters for proprietary content, client drafts, unreleased announcements, and anything covered by an NDA. If you need extra assurance, open your browser's network inspector while typing — you will see zero outgoing requests from this tool.
What is a good email subject-line length?
Most email clients truncate the subject line around 78 characters on desktop and as few as 30–40 characters on mobile preview panes. Studies from Mailchimp, Campaign Monitor, and HubSpot consistently find that subjects between 40 and 60 characters get the highest open rates. Put your hook in the first 30 characters so it survives mobile truncation. Avoid ALL CAPS, excessive punctuation, and spam-trigger words like "free," "guaranteed," and "act now," which can drop delivery into the promotions tab.