Free — no sign-up
Character & Word Counter
Count characters, words and lines before you hit a limit.
Runs entirely in your browser. Nothing you enter is sent to MASK.
Counts update as you type. Paste is fine — up to 500,000 characters.
Counts
- Characters
- 0
- UTF-16 code units
- Characters (as typed)
- 0
- what you'd count by eye
- Characters, no spaces
- 0
- Words
- 0
- Lines
- 0
- Paragraphs
- 0
- Reading time
- —
- at 200 words/min
Counters disagree with each other more often than you would expect, and almost always for the same reason: they report a single number called “characters” without saying which of the two possible characters they mean. This one reports both, side by side, so you can see when they diverge — which is exactly when an emoji, a flag or an accented letter is about to cost you more of a limit than it looks like it should.
Everything is measured in the page as you type. The text is never sent to MASK, so drafts, private notes and anything under embargo are as safe here as they are in a local text editor.
Questions
- Why are there two character counts?
- Because software and people count differently. “Characters” is the UTF-16 code-unit count — what a database column, an API and most server-side length checks actually measure. “Characters (as typed)” counts grapheme clusters: what you would count by eye. A family emoji is one character to read and eight code units to store, and an accented letter typed as a letter plus a combining mark is one to read and two to store. Showing only one of these numbers is why counters often disagree with the site you are pasting into.
- Which number matches a social network's character limit?
- It depends on the network, and this tool deliberately ships no platform presets — a limit copied from memory and left to go stale is worse than no limit at all. As a rule of thumb, limits enforced in a browser tend to track the code-unit count and limits described in help pages tend to describe what you see. If the exact boundary matters, check the platform's current documentation and compare it against both numbers here.
- How are words, lines and paragraphs counted?
- A word is a run of non-whitespace between whitespace, so double spaces, tabs and newlines never inflate the total. A line is a newline-separated row, and a trailing newline leaves a final empty line just as your editor shows one. A paragraph is a block separated from the next by at least one blank line, and blank blocks are ignored. One caveat worth knowing: scripts written without spaces — Chinese, Japanese, Thai — will report very few words, because there is no space to split on. For those, the character counts are the meaningful measure.
- Where does the reading time come from?
- It is the word count divided by 200 words a minute, rounded up — a common average for adult silent reading of ordinary prose. Treat it as a rough orientation rather than a measurement: reading speed varies enormously between readers and between a text message and a technical document.
- Does anything I paste here leave my browser?
- No. The counting runs in the page itself. There is no upload, no request to MASK and nothing stored — closing the tab is all it takes to be rid of the text.