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Echoryte

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Chinese Word Counter

A Chinese word counter that segments 中文 properly instead of counting spaces. Get word, character, sentence, and line totals for Chinese, English, and mixed text.

Open the tool
You get
Word, character, sentence, and line totals
Runs
In your browser, on your device
Costs
Nothing, with no account

Private by design

Paste your text. See your totals.

Your text stays in this tab.

Counting mode

For text in any language, including Japanese, Korean, Arabic, and Spanish.

Words
0
Characters
0
Sentences
0
Lines
0
0 words, 0 characters, 0 sentences, 0 lines.

Characters include spaces and punctuation. Word totals use your browser’s language-aware counting.

Step by step

How to use it

  1. Pick a counting mode

    Chinese + English for 中文 or mixed writing, English for English only, Multilingual for anything else.

  2. Type or paste your text

    Words, characters, sentences, and lines update instantly with every keystroke. Nothing is sent anywhere.

  3. Edit to fit your limit

    Trim or expand until the total is right, then copy the text back into your own document before you leave.

  4. Check which total counts

    Chinese assignments usually mean 字数 — read Characters. English journals and translation quotes usually mean Words.

What actually changes

Input
今天是学习中文的好日子。Hello, world!
Chinese + English mode
Words        11
Characters   30
Sentences     2
Lines         1

Segmentation finds 中文 word boundaries — 今天 / 是 / 学习 / 中文 — instead of treating the whole sentence as one long token.

Features

Why use this one

  • Real Chinese segmentation

    Word boundaries in 中文 come from the browser’s Unicode segmentation, so 学习 counts as one word rather than two characters or one giant blob of text.

  • Handles mixed Chinese and English

    Chinese + English mode counts both scripts in a single pass, which is what you need for technical writing, subtitles, and academic abstracts that switch between the two.

  • Live totals as you type

    Words, characters, sentences, and lines recompute on every keystroke. There is no count button and no waiting, so you can trim to a limit and watch it land.

  • Your text never leaves the tab

    Counting is pure JavaScript running locally. Unpublished drafts, client copy, and confidential documents are never transmitted or stored.

  • Emoji-safe character counts

    Characters are counted as visible units, so an emoji or an accented letter counts as one, not as the two or three code units it occupies internally.

  • Japanese, Korean, Arabic too

    Multilingual mode applies the same segmentation to other scripts that do not delimit words with spaces, including Japanese and Thai.

Most word counters split text on spaces. Chinese does not use spaces between words, so those tools report either one word for a whole paragraph or nothing at all. This Chinese word counter uses your browser’s built-in language segmentation to find real word boundaries in 中文, and it counts English in the same pass — useful when your writing mixes both. Totals update as you type, entirely inside this tab.

Chinese words and Chinese characters are not the same count

This trips up most people the first time. 中文 is two characters (中 and 文) but one word. 图书馆 is three characters and one word. So a 500-character Chinese essay is nowhere near 500 words — as a rough rule, Chinese runs about 1.5 to 2 characters per word. Publishers ask for whichever suits them: Chinese universities and print media usually specify 字数, a character count, while translation agencies and international journals often want words. This counter shows both at once. Note that the Characters total counts everything in the box, including spaces, punctuation, and any English mixed in, so it is not a count of Chinese characters in isolation.

Why the three modes give different numbers

The mode tells the segmenter which language rules to apply, and that changes where word boundaries fall. English mode uses English rules, so it is the right choice for English prose and handles hyphenated compounds and contractions the way you would expect. Chinese + English mode applies Chinese rules and still counts embedded English words correctly, which makes it the one to use for any text containing 中文. Multilingual mode follows your browser’s own locale and covers Japanese, Korean, Arabic, Thai, and everything else. No mode filters anything out — text in other languages is still counted, just with different boundary rules.

Common reasons people count Chinese words

Translation quoting is the biggest one: agencies price per source word or per 字, and the gap between the two is roughly a factor of 1.7, so using the wrong figure misprices the job badly. Academic submissions come next — Chinese universities and journals almost always specify 字数, and the limit is usually strict enough that a rough estimate is not good enough. Subtitlers count characters per line to keep cues readable, since Chinese subtitles fit far fewer characters on screen than the 42-character Latin convention allows. And anyone writing for platforms with hard caps — Weibo posts, product listings, app store descriptions, meta descriptions — needs a number before they publish rather than after they are truncated.

FAQ

Common questions

How does this Chinese word counter know where words begin and end?

It uses Intl.Segmenter, the text segmentation feature built into modern browsers, which implements the Unicode standard for word boundaries. That is the same machinery browsers use when you double-click a word to select it. It is a dictionary-free statistical approach, so it is fast and private, but it can differ slightly from a specialised Chinese NLP library on rare compounds and names.

Should I report 字数 or word count to my professor?

Ask, and if you cannot, assume 字数 — Chinese academic and publishing conventions almost always mean characters. Read the Characters figure for that, keeping in mind it includes punctuation and spaces. Word count is the norm for English-language journals and for translation pricing.

Why does another word counter give me a different number?

Different tools draw word boundaries differently, especially for Chinese compounds, proper nouns, and mixed-script text. Some naive counters simply split on spaces and report 1 word for an entire Chinese paragraph. When you are checking against a hard limit, use whichever tool your publisher or client uses.

Are spaces and punctuation included in the character count?

Yes. Characters counts every visible unit in the box, including spaces, line breaks, punctuation, and emoji. If you need Chinese characters only, remove the surrounding English and punctuation first, or read the word total instead.

Can I count a whole document?

Paste it in. There is no length limit beyond what your browser can comfortably hold, and long documents count instantly because the work is local. For subtitle files, convert SRT to TXT first to strip the timecodes, then paste the text here.

Is my text stored or sent anywhere?

Neither. Nothing is uploaded, saved, or logged — the text exists only in this tab’s memory and vanishes when you close it. That also means you should keep your own copy; the tool has no drafts to recover.

Format references used on this page