Type or paste text to instantly see word count, character count, line count, and paragraph count, plus a live check against social media post limits.
| Words (no spaces) | |
| Words (with spaces) | |
| Character count | |
| Lines | |
| Paragraphs |
English "word count" is usually measured by splitting on whitespace, so it's obvious at a glance how many words a sentence has. Chinese doesn't use spaces between words, and each Chinese character already carries complete meaning on its own — so in Chinese, what people call "word count" in practice almost always means "character count," where every Chinese character and punctuation mark counts as one unit. That's why this tool lists both "Words (with spaces)" and "Character count": under normal conditions the two numbers match, and they only diverge when text contains emoji or certain rare symbols. That's because JavaScript strings are stored internally using UTF-16 encoding, and most emoji are actually made of two "surrogate pair" code units — counted using raw encoding length, one emoji might register as 2, but counted using proper Unicode character-boundary awareness, that same emoji correctly registers as 1. Beyond character count, there's an even easier-to-overlook dimension: byte count. Under the common UTF-8 encoding, one English letter takes up 1 byte, but one Chinese character typically takes up 3 bytes — this matters a lot for systems that measure limits in bytes rather than characters (like old-school 70-character SMS limits or certain database column lengths). Typing 100 Chinese characters can consume roughly 3× the storage that typing 100 English letters would.
Character limits actually reflect the content style and use case each platform is trying to shape. X's (Twitter's) 280-character limit traces back to its original design as a short, real-time information feed that forces concise writing. Threads' 500 and Instagram's 2200 give more room for captions and longer narratives alongside images. YouTube video titles get only 100 characters because a title's job is to grab attention quickly in search results and next to a thumbnail — anything longer gets truncated and hurts SEO. YouTube descriptions get 5000 characters because descriptions commonly need to hold timestamps, source links, and caption info. Understanding the use case behind each limit helps you decide, post by post, whether to write long-form or keep it tight.
Many social platforms' character limits were originally designed around English usage patterns, but Chinese text has much higher "information density" than English — for the same 100 characters, a chunk of Chinese text typically conveys far more content than 100 English letters can, because every Chinese character is a complete syllable and semantic unit, while English averages 4–5 letters per word. That means on platforms with tight character limits (like X's 280), Chinese writers actually have more effective room to say something complete than English writers do, at the same nominal limit. The flip side is worth flagging too: because Chinese is so information-dense, it's easy to accidentally blow past a limit without realizing it — running a quick character check before posting beats eyeballing it.
Take the Chinese sentence "今天天氣很好，我們一起去海邊玩，順便拍幾張美美的照片留念，晚上再去吃海鮮大餐！" (roughly "The weather is great today, let's go to the beach, take some nice photos, and have seafood for dinner tonight!"). Excluding punctuation it's about 30 Chinese characters, and including punctuation it comes to roughly 39 characters total. Against X's 280-character limit, that uses under 14% of the budget; against YouTube's 100-character title limit, there's still plenty of room. But rewrite the same idea in English with similar phrasing — something like "The weather is great today, let's go to the beach, take some nice photos, and have seafood for dinner tonight!" — and the character count typically balloons past 100. That's exactly the "higher Chinese information density" point from the previous section showing up in real numbers, and it's why Chinese speakers often feel like the same idea "takes fewer characters" in Chinese than in English.
No. The entire calculation runs live, 100% in your browser. Your text only exists in the current tab's memory — there's no network request that sends it anywhere. Refreshing or closing the page clears it, and it's never stored anywhere.
Yes. "Words (no spaces)," "Words (with spaces)," and the line/paragraph counts are all calculated using proper Unicode character-boundary detection, so Chinese characters and most emoji each count as exactly 1 unit. The "Character count" column, by contrast, uses the raw computer encoding length — for ordinary text it matches "Words (with spaces)," and only a handful of emoji or special symbols built from "surrogate pairs" cause a 1–2 character difference between the two. That's actually why both columns are kept — so you can compare them directly.
Formatting itself doesn't get counted, since the text box only holds plain text — pasting automatically strips fonts, colors, hyperlinks, and other formatting tags, leaving only the raw text for counting. One thing to watch for: if your original document already contains extra spaces or line breaks (like double Enter after every paragraph), those spaces and line breaks are still counted in the "with spaces" and line stats.
No, they're not a live lookup — these numbers are fixed reference values written into the page, reflecting each platform's publicly known rules as of when this was written. Platforms occasionally adjust their rules, so if you're posting something where the exact limit really matters, also check the platform's own live display or help docs — treat this tool's numbers as a quick estimate.
Because Facebook posts technically allow extremely long text (the official cap is over 60,000 characters) — going over 500 characters doesn't get a post blocked or truncated by the platform. The 500 shown here is a content-strategy "readability recommendation": longer posts are more likely to get skipped or need a "See more" click to expand. It's not a platform-enforced rule, which is why it's flagged when you go over without implying the post will fail.