Free tool
Chinese Word Counter
Paste Chinese text and get an instant breakdown: how many Chinese characters it contains, how many words, how many sentences, and how much of it is punctuation, Latin letters or digits.
Detailed breakdown
About this tool
Counting Chinese is not the same as counting English. English separates words with spaces, so a word count is trivial. Chinese writes 我今天很忙 with no spaces at all, which means "word count" and "character count" are two genuinely different numbers — and the one you need depends on whether you are filling in an HSK essay, quoting a translator, or checking whether a caption fits.
This counter gives you both, side by side, plus the details that usually matter in practice: how many of the characters are actually Chinese (as opposed to punctuation or Latin text), how many sentences the passage breaks into, and how much punctuation or whitespace it contains.
Everything runs in your browser. Your text is never uploaded, so you can safely paste a draft contract, an unpublished script or a client document.
What it does
Chinese characters counted separately
CJK ideographs are counted on their own line, so 「Hello，你好！」 reports 2 Chinese characters rather than being lumped in with the Latin letters and punctuation.
Word count that matches real segmentation
Chinese words are grouped by runs of Chinese characters and Latin words, giving you a usable approximation of word count for quoting and length limits.
Sentence and paragraph breakdown
Sentences are split on 。！？； and their Latin equivalents, so you can see structure at a glance and spot runaway sentences in a draft.
Total characters and whitespace
The input shows its total character count as you type, while the detailed breakdown reports whitespace separately for limits that treat spaces differently.
Reading time estimate
An estimate based on a typical native reading speed of roughly 300 Chinese characters per minute, useful for scripting videos and presentations.
Entirely client-side
No account, no upload, no request to any server. Close the tab and the text is gone.
How to use it
- 1Paste or type your Chinese textDrop in anything — a sentence, an essay, a chat log, a subtitle file. Mixed Chinese and English is fine.
- 2Read the countsThe statistics update as you type. Chinese characters, total characters, words, sentences and paragraphs are all shown at once.
- 3Check the detail breakdownExpand the breakdown to see punctuation, Latin letters, digits and whitespace counted separately — helpful when a limit only applies to the Chinese portion.
- 4Copy or clearCopy the text back out once you have trimmed it to length, or clear the box and start again.
What people use it for
- Checking that an HSK writing task hits its character minimum
- Quoting translation work, which is almost always priced per source character
- Fitting a Weibo post, a video title or an app string into a hard character limit
- Estimating how long a script will take to read aloud
- Measuring how much new material is in a textbook chapter
Frequently asked questions
What counts as a Chinese character in this tool?
Any CJK unified ideograph — the range that covers both simplified and traditional Han characters, including extension blocks. Chinese punctuation such as 。、！ is counted as punctuation, not as a Chinese character, because form fields and translation quotes almost never count punctuation as billable characters.
Why is the word count lower than the character count?
Most Chinese words are two characters long. 学生 is one word made of two characters; 图书馆 is one word made of three. As a rule of thumb, a Chinese passage has roughly 55-65% as many words as it has characters, which is why translators quote per character rather than per word.
Does the counter handle traditional characters?
Yes. Simplified and traditional characters live in the same Unicode ranges, so 漢字 and 汉字 are both counted as two Chinese characters. The tool makes no attempt to convert between the two.
Is my text sent anywhere?
No. The counting happens entirely in JavaScript in your own browser. There is no network request, no logging and no storage, which makes the tool safe for confidential drafts.
How is reading time estimated?
It assumes roughly 300 Chinese characters per minute, a common figure for adult native silent reading. Read-aloud speed is much slower — closer to 150-200 characters per minute — so halve the estimate if you are timing a voiceover.
Can I count an entire document?
Yes. Paste as much text as you like; the tool handles long documents without trouble. If you are working from a PDF or Word file, copy the text out first — the counter takes plain text only.
Guides and further reading
In-depth articles covering the background behind this tool.
Other Chinese tools
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