Chinese Character Counter
Count Chinese characters, words, and text length accurately – online & free.
Statistics
What Is a Chinese Character Counter?
A Chinese Character Counter is an online tool that helps you count the number of Chinese characters (汉字) in a text. Unlike English, Chinese does not use spaces between words, so counting words and characters requires different logic.
This tool is commonly used for:
- Writing assignments
- Academic papers
- Social media character limits
- Translation & localization work
Chinese Character Count vs Word Count
| Term | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Chinese Character Count | Number of individual Chinese characters (汉字) |
| Chinese Word Count | Estimated number of Chinese words (requires segmentation) |
| English Word Count | Based on spaces between words |
In Chinese, character count is usually more important than word count. Most schools, exams, and platforms specify limits based on characters, not words.
How Does Chinese Character Counting Work?
- Each Chinese character (汉字) counts as 1 character
- Punctuation may be included or excluded
- Spaces are usually ignored
- Chinese word count is estimated using segmentation rules
Note: Chinese word count is an approximation and may vary across tools.
Who Uses a Chinese Character Counter?
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
How many characters are in Chinese text?
There is no fixed limit. Chinese text length is usually measured by number of characters, not words.
Is Chinese word count accurate?
Chinese word count is approximate because Chinese does not use spaces. Different tools may produce different results.
Does this tool support Simplified and Traditional Chinese?
Yes. This Chinese Character Counter supports Simplified Chinese (简体中文) and Traditional Chinese (繁體中文).
Is punctuation counted as characters?
You can choose to include or exclude punctuation, depending on your needs.
Why Use This Chinese Character Counter?
User Guide
Welcome to our Chinese character counter and Chinese word counter tool! To get started, simply start typing in the text-box above. The number of Chinese characters will display in the statistics panel.
The total characters will display in the Total Characters box. The total characters include anything that is a character, so Chinese characters, characters from other languages, symbols, numbers etc. are all included.
You can also see a running count of spaces, estimated words, English characters and numbers in the statistics grid. The space count includes any whitespace character, so newlines (enter key) counts as a space.
Find the word count of a Chinese text using our Chinese word counter
The word count represents the estimated number of Chinese words. The way we estimated the Chinese word counter works is by sophisticated segmentation of the Chinese characters.
The English character count is simply any letter of the alphabet A-Z in upper or lower case. The number count displays the count of numbers.
Once you are done typing, click the green "COPY TEXT" button to copy all the text inside the text-box. This makes it convenient to then paste into whatever document you are using.
Overview of Chinese Characters
The Chinese writing system is largely hieroglyphic. In the beginning, each character was a tiny picture. Later on, the characters have grown less "picturesque", but some are still intriguing to look at. They were almost like emojis, but a little different.
The character 豳 is a good example. It's made of one 山 and two 豕s. 山 means "mountain" and 豕 "swine". So 豳 is likely a place where there are lots of wild boars. Historically, 豳 was a capital of the early Zhou people.
Chinese Alphabet
Due to its hieroglyphic origin, Chinese doesn't have an alphabet. Its basic unit is a character. Each character is unique, composed of radicals or strokes. Characters form phrases, and phrases form sentences.
How many characters are in the Chinese language?
It's said that there are more than 100,000 characters, but in daily life, a 3,000 character vocabulary would make you literate, a 5,000 one would make you well-educated, and an 8,000 one would make you learned.
For small Chinese kids, copying and memorizing characters is great torture, as much as conjugations are to French children. Even after they grow up, encountering strange characters or mispronouncing characters might still cause them daily headache.
In terms of structure, a character can be semi-encircled, like 区, or completely encircled, like 囚. It can be "one-piece", like 人, or a composite of multiple radicals, like 猫 and 孬.
Understanding Chinese Characters
How to guess what a Chinese character means
In some cases, if you know the rules, you can guess the pronunciation or meaning of a character.
For instance, the left radical of 猫 is 犭, indicating that the character is relating to an animal; the right radical is 苗, whose pronunciation is "meow". So you'd instantly figure out that 猫 refers to "cat".
The character 孬 is made up of two other characters: 不 and 好. As 不 means "not" and 好 "good", 孬 very likely means "not good". It does indeed.
However, the guess rules don't work in all cases. For example, you'd presume the pronunciation of 裸 is "guǒ" due to its radical 果, but it actually is "luǒ". The two sounds are close, but still different.
Even native speakers sometimes make such mistakes, mispronouncing 墅 for 野 or 侪 for 齐.
Introduction to Pinyin
What are Pinyins?
Pinyins, which were developed by economist Zhou Youguang, were invented as a way to note down the precise pronunciations of characters. Imagine learning Chinese, a language with no alphabet just through listening alone. Pinyin is a representation of Chinese characters with the Latin alphabet.
Pinyins have vastly increased literacy throughout China; eased the classroom agony of studying Chinese; and facilitated the rapid entry of Chinese on computer keyboards and cellphones.
Parts of a Pinyin
The pinyin of each character has three parts: initial, final, and tone. There are 23 initials and 24 finals, which are represented in Latin alphabet, and a total of four tones, which are represented by the signs: ˉ, ˊ, ˇ, ˋ.
Pinyin Examples
Let's take "shù", the pinyin of 墅, for an example. "sh" is the initial, "u" is the final, and "ˋ" indicates the tone.
Here is another example of the four basic pitched tones using Pinyin.
- First: mā - high and level
- Second: má - starts medium in tone, then rises to the top
- Third: mǎ - starts low, dips to the bottom, then rises toward the top
- Fourth: mà - starts at the top, then falls sharp to the bottom
The pitch in which a sound is spoken affects the meaning. For example, if you say mā with a high tone it means "mom", but má with a rising tone means "numb".
Fun Facts & Conclusion
Chinese characters can form riddles
Like alphabet-based languages, Chinese characters also make funny riddles. One of my favorites is "虫二". 虫 is the core of the character 風, and 二 is the central part of 月 with its outer frame removed. Both 風 and 月 are romantic symbols in Chinese culture. So the answer to this riddle is 風月无边 (boundless romance).
Conclusion
Thanks for using our Chinese character counter. We hope this is useful to you in giving you a Chinese character count and Chinese word count.
Good luck writing and please feel free to contact us if you have a question or just want to say hello. And by the way, if you want to say hello in Chinese, you would say 你好, the pinyin for that being Nǐ hǎo. Or an even more basic way of saying that (albeit slightly less accurate) would simply by "knee how".
If you need more features, including English character and word counts please use the character counter on our home page.