Word count
Chinese counts characters and English counts words separately — that's how mixed text stays accurate. Updates as you type.
"Chinese characters" counts only Han characters; "English words" are split on spaces and punctuation; "reading time" is estimated at 400 Chinese characters/min and 220 English words/min.
When to use it
- You are up against a platform limit such as 2,000 Chinese characters or 500 English words and need to check the two counts separately.
- You have a mixed Chinese/English draft and need separate character and word counts before quoting a translation or estimating reading time.
When not to
- You need the word count of a PDF or Word file: copying it to plain text loses headers, footers and table structure, so the count built into the app is more accurate.
- You need publisher-grade counting that includes punctuation, footnotes and references: this tool follows its own rules and leaves punctuation out of both counts, so check against the publisher's requirements.
Counting happens locally in your browser as you type; nothing is uploaded or saved. Limits: only Han characters in the basic block and Extension A are counted, which includes Japanese kanji — kana, Hangul and rarer Han characters fall outside the Chinese count; punctuation is excluded from both counts; characters use JavaScript UTF-16 length, so emoji and other supplementary characters usually count as two; reading time is an estimate at 400 Chinese characters or 220 English words per minute, not a measurement.
Frequently asked
How are Chinese and English counted separately?
Han characters in U+4E00–9FFF and U+3400–4DBF each count as one Chinese character. Those characters are then replaced with spaces, and the rest is split into runs matching [A-Za-z0-9_'-]+, each counted as one English word. So ‘你好 world’ is 2 Chinese characters and 1 English word. Japanese kanji do count as Chinese characters; kana, Hangul and rare Han characters in CJK Extension B and later are not counted, and appear only in the character total.
How is reading time calculated?
Chinese characters ÷ 400 plus English words ÷ 220, in minutes. Under one minute the result is shown in seconds; an empty input shows —. This is a silent-reading estimate and excludes charts, re-reading and note-taking; mixed text is timed in two parts and added.
Do punctuation, numbers and spaces count?
Punctuation and spaces count in neither the Chinese character nor the English word count: punctuation shows up in both character totals, while spaces appear only in the with-spaces total and are excluded from the no-space total. A run of digits such as 2026 counts as one English word, and underscores, hyphens and apostrophes inside a word do not split it (well-being and don't are one word each). Emoji usually count as two UTF-16 code units in the character total (joined emoji can be longer) and count as neither Chinese nor English. Paragraphs are separated by blank lines; a single line break does not start a new one.