Why do character count and byte size differ?

Characters outside ASCII take multiple bytes in UTF-8 — an emoji is one character but four bytes. Forms and APIs usually enforce byte or UTF-16 limits, so watch the byte counter for anything multilingual.

How are words counted?

By whitespace separation. "well-known" is one word and punctuation sticks to its word; if you need linguistic word counts (hyphens, contractions) treat this as the fast estimate it is.

What counts as a line?

Every newline-terminated row, so a trailing newline adds one to the count. Empty lines count too — they are real lines in the text.

Text statistics — Guide

Get information about a text, the number of characters, the number of words, its size in bytes, ...

What it is and when to use it

Live statistics for the text you paste: character count, word count, line count and byte size, updating as you type. The byte size accounts for multi-byte characters, which is what actually matters when filling forms with length limits, sizing payloads or estimating storage.

Counts characters, words and byte size — useful when writing copy or checking an API limit.

How to use it

Paste the text
Read the statistics
Cross-check the byte count against the limit where relevant

A worked example

Fill in sample text

The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.

Copy this into the tool, or open Text statistics

Things that trip people up

In UTF-8 a CJK character is about 3 bytes, so the byte count differs from the character count

Questions people ask

Why do character count and byte size differ?: Characters outside ASCII take multiple bytes in UTF-8 — an emoji is one character but four bytes. Forms and APIs usually enforce byte or UTF-16 limits, so watch the byte counter for anything multilingual.
How are words counted?: By whitespace separation. "well-known" is one word and punctuation sticks to its word; if you need linguistic word counts (hyphens, contractions) treat this as the fast estimate it is.
What counts as a line?: Every newline-terminated row, so a trailing newline adds one to the count. Empty lines count too — they are real lines in the text.

Next steps

Open the Text statistics tool

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