When a word count helps
Word counts are useful for checking a draft against a length limit. Character totals are useful for forms with a fixed allowance. The two measurements describe different things: a short word and a long word each count as one word, but contain different numbers of characters.
Steps
- Open the Toolbox and paste your draft into the text box.
- Read the word and character totals below the box.
- Edit your text and the totals update automatically.
- Copy the text back into your document when finished.
How counting works
This tool treats one or more spaces, tabs or line breaks as a separator. For example, “Write a better email” contains four words. Leading and trailing spaces do not create extra words. Characters include spaces and punctuation; Unicode code points are counted, so some combined emoji may count as several characters.
Limits
Languages that do not separate words with spaces need language-aware segmentation. Different editors can also disagree about hyphenated expressions or punctuation. If a publisher or school specifies a particular counter, use its required method for your final submission.
Your text is processed in the page on your device. The counter does not upload it to our server.