Calculators

Statistics

Calculator Use

Count the number of characters, words, spaces, tabs and line breaks in a sample of text. This counter tool counts visible and non-visible characters in a text passage and also finds the word count.

Insert your text sample by pasting, typing or using the speech-to-text function on your device.

The character counter also provides a character frequency chart that tells you how many times each character appears in your text sample.

How Do Character Counters Count?

Character counter tools are not all the same. Some count line breaks and tabs as characters while others do not.

We count whitespace characters such as spaces, tabs and line breaks in addition to letter and punctuation characters. We count symbols such as $ or & or ( as characters but not as words.

What are Stop Words?

"Stop words" are words that are not processed by a program that counts words. They are filtered out of the process and ignored when calculating the total word count.

This character counter does not ignore any stop words in the word count total. Even small words like "a," "an" and "I" are included in the word count total on this page.

If you need to find word frequency or word density and you want to exclude stop words use our Word Counter calculator.

Character Counter Output

These bullet points explain how this character counter calculates totals. Character totals, frequency, and word totals are shown in the answer.

• All Characters - includes all visible characters and whitespace characters including spaces, tabs and line breaks
• Visible Characters - characters that you can see in the text are counted. Whitespace characters are not counted for this metric.
• Unique Characters - the number of unique characters that occur in the text sample, not including whitespace characters
• Spaces - includes all space characters such as a normal spacebar space, non-breaking space, thin space, en space, em space, etc. Spaces are counted as one character.
• Tabs - tabs are counted as one character
• Line Breaks - on computers and other devices line breaks are actually made up of two non-visible characters: the carriage return (CR) and the line feed (LF). These two entities are counted here as one character known as the CRLF.
• Words - these are groups of one or more letters or numbers. "Twenty" and "20" are both counted as words. Special characters by themselves such as & or $ or ( are not counted as words. Compound words like "up-to-date" or "sister-in-law" are counted as one word.
• Character Frequency Table - we list the total number of times each character is found in the text. We calculate frequency of each character as a percentage of all visible characters counted.