How to word counter and character count
- Paste or type your text into the box — English, Hindi, or the two mixed together.
- Press Count the words.
- Read the row the form actually asked for: characters and characters without spaces are usually different numbers.
- Press Save the file if you want the whole set of numbers as a plain .txt.
Which "character" did the form mean?
You get three character numbers because three exist. Characters counts what your eye counts: one emoji is one, and so is a Devanagari conjunct. Characters without spaces drops the gaps. UTF-16 units is what the code behind a form counts, and it is the one that jumps when you type an emoji or a Hindi letter with a matra hanging off it.
When a box says maximum 500 characters and refuses a paragraph you can see is shorter than that, the third number is nearly always the reason. Paste the paragraph here, compare the three, and trim against whichever one is over.
What counts as a word
Microsoft Word and Google Docs do not agree, so you pick which of them to imitate. Word splits on spaces and nothing else, so a lone plus sign between two numbers is a word and 6 + 3 is three of them. Google Docs also splits a token at a full stop, comma, slash, colon, question mark or equals sign, so the same sum is two words, 4,192 is two, and a full web address is six.
On ordinary prose the two agree, and neither of them shatters state-of-the-art into four words. Hindi typed in Devanagari is counted the same way English is, because every Indian script puts spaces between words. Chinese and Japanese are counted one word per character, which is what both word processors do.
The same answer on an old phone and a new one
Browsers disagree about where one character ends and the next begins. A Devanagari conjunct is a single character on a current Chrome and two on an older Android WebView, because the rule that holds it together arrived in a later version of the Unicode data the phone ships with. This page works out the boundaries itself rather than asking the phone, so the number you read here is the number somebody on a different handset reads.