Character Counter Word counter, letter counter and platform limits

Characters

Each letter, digit, space, punctuation mark and line break counts as one. An emoji counts as one even when it is built from several code points, such as a family or a flag, because it shows as a single symbol. Without spaces leaves out spaces, tabs and line breaks.

Words, sentences, paragraphs

Words are split the way your browser splits them for editing, so "don't" and "e-mail" are one word each and Chinese or Japanese text is split into words rather than counted as one block. Sentences end at a full stop, question mark or exclamation mark. Paragraphs are separated by a blank line.

UTF-8 bytes

The size of the text when saved or sent as UTF-8, which matters for database fields, file names and some form limits. English letters take 1 byte, accented letters 2, most Chinese, Japanese and Korean characters 3, and emoji 4 or more.

Reading and speaking time

Based on 238 words per minute for silent reading and 183 for reading aloud, the averages for English non-fiction in Marc Brysbaert's 2019 review of reading-rate studies. Your own pace may be faster or slower.

160 or 70 characters

A text message holds 160 characters when every character is in the GSM-7 alphabet, which covers English letters, digits, common punctuation and some accented letters. One character outside it, such as an emoji, a curly quote or ç, switches the whole message to Unicode, and the limit drops to 70.

The tool lists the characters that caused the switch so you can replace them.

Long messages

Longer texts are sent in parts and joined on the phone. Each part loses a few characters to the joining information, so parts hold 153 GSM-7 characters or 67 Unicode characters. The symbols ^ { } [ ] ~ | € and \ take two GSM-7 places each.

Carriers usually bill each part as a separate message.