Word and Character Counter
Count words, characters, UTF-8 bytes, UTF-16 code units, lines, sentences and paragraphs, with an estimated reading time.
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Input
Count words, characters and bytes
Output
22 words
Characters
122
Without spaces
100
UTF-8 bytes
122
UTF-16 units (.length)
122
Lines
3
Sentences
3
Paragraphs
2
Reading time
1 min
At 238 words a minute.
Characters are counted as a reader sees them (grapheme clusters), so an emoji with a skin tone is one. JavaScript's .length counts UTF-16 code units, and a VARCHAR limit in MySQL utf8mb4 counts code points, which is why the three numbers can differ.
Runs in this browser. Nothing you paste is sent to a server.
About this tool
Method, assumptions, practical next steps, and limits.
Why the character counts disagree
A character is not one thing. An emoji with a skin tone is one grapheme, two code points and four UTF-16 code units, and takes eight bytes in UTF-8. JavaScript's .length counts UTF-16 code units; PHP's strlen() counts bytes and mb_strlen() code points; a MySQL VARCHAR(255) in utf8mb4 limits code points. When a form says a value is too long and it looks short, compare these.
Limits that use bytes
Some limits count bytes rather than characters: a single InnoDB index key, a 255-byte filename on most Linux file systems, the 4 KB that browsers allow per cookie. The UTF-8 byte count is the one to check against those.
Reading time
238 words a minute is the average silent reading rate for non-fiction found in Brysbaert's 2019 meta-analysis of 190 studies. Technical text with code reads slower.