Character Counter
Count characters, words and lines as you type.
What you provide
How this calculation works
The text is measured as you type: characters with and without spaces, words, sentences and lines.
What the results mean
- Characters (no spaces)
- The count some platforms use for limits — whitespace excluded.
- Words
- Runs of non-space characters, the same convention word processors use, so a hyphenated compound counts as one word.
- Lines
- Every line break counts, blank ones included — text hard-wrapped by an email client shows far more lines than paragraphs.
Common problems and fixes
- The count is over the limit on the site I am pasting into
- Check which figure that platform enforces before rewriting anything. Some count characters including spaces, some exclude whitespace, and several count a URL as a fixed length regardless of how long it actually is. Both figures are shown here so you can compare against the right one.
- An emoji seems to count as more than one character
- It often genuinely is more than one. Many emoji are built from several code points joined together — a flag, a skin-tone variant or a family sequence can be four or more — and most character limits count each. This is a real property of the text rather than a miscount.
- The number keeps moving while a large paste settles
- Counting runs on every input event, so a very large paste updates in stages as the browser works through it. Give it a moment; the figure it settles on is the accurate one.
Frequently asked questions
Does it count spaces?
Both figures are shown — total characters including spaces, and the count with whitespace removed, which is what some character limits use.
Is my text sent anywhere?
No. The counting happens in your browser as you type, and no request carries the text anywhere — you can confirm that in the network panel of your developer tools. That is why it is reasonable to paste a draft here that you would not upload to a service.
Why does my word processor show a slightly different number?
Because a document contains things pasted text does not — headers, footers, footnotes, captions and text boxes are included or excluded differently depending on the application. For the body prose itself the two agree to within a few words, which is well inside the tolerance of any limit worth worrying about.
Put this on your own site
Free to embed, no attribution required beyond the source link the frame carries itself. It runs entirely in your visitor's browser, sets no cookies and loads no third-party script.
<iframe src="https://runthetests.com/embed/character-counter/" width="100%" height="560" style="border:1px solid #e5e5e5;border-radius:8px" title="Character Counter" loading="lazy"></iframe>
Preview it at https://runthetests.com/embed/character-counter/. Embedded pages are marked noindex, so yours stays the canonical copy — not this one.