Word Count vs Character Count

The difference

A character is any single symbol: a letter, digit, space, punctuation mark or emoji. A word is a group of characters between spaces. A short text of long words has a low word count but a high character count, and the reverse for short words. That is why a limit of 280 characters can hold anywhere from about 35 to 70 words.

Characters with and without spaces

Most limits count characters including spaces and line breaks; some count only visible characters. The two figures for the same text differ by the number of whitespace characters, roughly one per word. The Character Counter shows both. The Space Counter shows exactly how many spaces a text contains.

Converting between them

Use the Characters to Words Converter and Words to Characters Converter converters for any figure and to change the assumption. Treat the result as a ±10 percent estimate; measure the real text if a submission depends on it.

Which does what

For social posts, see Social Media Character Limits; for metadata, see Ideal Meta Title and Description Length.

Non-English text

For Urdu and other scripts, characters and words behave differently from English. A text of 100 Urdu words typically has fewer characters than 100 English words, but each character takes more storage; see How Many Bytes Is a Character?. Chinese, Japanese and Korean are normally measured in characters because they do not use spaces between words.

Try it yourself

Put the numbers above to work with these free tools:

Frequently asked questions