Character and word counter
Characters with and without spaces, words, sentences, bytes and reading time.
Summary
- Characters
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- Without spaces
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- Words
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- Sentences
- —
- Paragraphs
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- Bytes in UTF-8
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- Reading time
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- Speaking time
- —
title
0 / 60
Page title in search results: about 60 characters fit
description
0 / 160
Snippet under the title: about 160 characters fit
Repeated words will show up here.
Calculated in your browser — nothing is sent to the server
In a Linux terminal
wc -m file.txt
# characters (UTF-8 aware)
wc -w file.txt
# words
wc -c file.txt
# bytes
tr -d '[:space:]' < file.txt | wc -m
# characters without spaces
grep -oE '\w+' file.txt | sort | uniq -c | sort -rn
# most frequent words
Keep in mindIn UTF-8 an accented or Cyrillic letter takes 2 bytes and an emoji 4: a byte limit runs out first.
How it counts
- A word is a run of letters and digits: “well-known” and “don't” are one word each.
- Bytes are UTF-8: 1 for Latin letters, 2 for Cyrillic, 4 for emoji.
- Reading time assumes 200 words a minute, speaking time 130.
FAQ
Do spaces count as characters?
Yes: “Characters” includes spaces, tabs and line breaks. For “characters without spaces”, take the “Without spaces” figure.
How long should a title and a description be?
Search engines show about 60 characters of a title and 160 of a description and cut the rest. Put what matters first.
Why does the count differ from Word?
Word skips line breaks and counts emoji differently. Here a line break is a character too, as in
wc -m.