Character Counter
Count characters, words, lines and UTF-8 bytes live as you type, with built-in targets like Twitter (280) or Weibo (140).
| Characters | 0 |
|---|---|
| Characters (no spaces) | 0 |
| Words | 0 |
| Lines | 0 |
| Paragraphs | 0 |
| Bytes (UTF-8) | 0 |
What is it
Counting text sounds trivial until you compare notes: a character, a word and a byte are three different things. Chinese characters usually count as one word each, English words are split by spaces, and bytes measure how much space the text actually takes on disk — emoji take several bytes. This tool shows all of them at once, updated as you type.
Notes & fun facts
Twitter copied its 140-character limit from pagers, whose screens could show exactly that many letters — and Weibo later did the same in China. When Twitter doubled to 280 in 2017, people screamed that the magic was gone, but the counter is still the quiet judge of every post.
Origin & history
Counting words became a routine task with word processors: WordStar (1978) and early Microsoft Word (1983) already had count commands. The UTF-8 byte measure comes from the encoding Ken Thompson and Rob Pike designed at a Vancouver restaurant table in 1992; UTF-8 became the Unicode standard way of storing text.