Word Counter

How to use the word counter

Every writing platform counts words differently, and checking the count before you submit is the most basic sanity check there is. But the need is more complicated than it looks — "word count" means completely different things in different contexts. Word counts words, the WeChat Official Account backend counts characters, and a publisher calculating an author's fee by the thousand characters counts punctuation too. This tool lays out every measure so you can take whichever one you need.

What each number means

• Total characters: every character, including spaces, line breaks and punctuation. This is the most intuitive measure, and the one most platform dashboards show.
• Characters (no spaces): the length after stripping all whitespace. In Chinese writing this is usually very close to the total.
• CJK characters: only the characters inside the CJK Unified Ideographs range (\u4e00-\u9fa5).
• Words (incl. Chinese): English split on spaces, Chinese counted per character and added in. This is the closest match to the "Words" figure in Word's word count.
• Estimated reading time: based on 300 Chinese characters per minute and 200 English words per minute. This is the "takes N minutes to read" figure you see on blogs.

Why Chinese platforms disagree so wildly

Because Chinese has no natural word boundaries. In English, hello world is obviously two words — the space does the job. But 你好世界 is four characters. It can be read as four characters, as two words (你好 and 世界), or as a single four-character word. Every product picked a different measure:

• Word / WPS: counts consecutive Chinese as individual characters, and reports characters separately
• WeChat Official Account: shows character count, and spaces and line breaks are included
• Plagiarism checkers: usually total characters including punctuation
• Publisher fees: by laid-out characters, including punctuation and spaces

So before you submit, confirm which measure the other side means — it saves the argument about "but I clearly wrote enough".

Typical lengths for common formats

• WeChat Official Account article: 1,500–3,000 characters is comfortable. Under 800 feels thin; past 5,000 the completion rate drops noticeably
• Xiaohongshu note: 1,000-character body limit, but 300–800 performs best — the images matter more than the text
• Zhihu answer: 500–2,000 characters; past 2,000 use headings to break it up
• Weibo: 140 characters for regular users, up to 2,000 for a long post
• Short-video script: roughly 250–300 characters per minute, so a one-minute video is about 250–300 characters
• Undergraduate dissertation: usually 8,000–15,000 characters (counted as characters)
• SEO article: 1,200–2,000 characters. Too short and you can't cover the keywords; too long and indexing gets less efficient

Tip: use character count to estimate layout

When you're building a poster, a slide or subtitles for a short video, character count gives you a quick width estimate. A Chinese character is roughly one character wide; Latin letters and digits are roughly half. Twenty Chinese characters in a row will about fill a phone screen. Counting first saves a lot of back-and-forth tweaking.

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