Free Chinese Tool
Paste Chinese text below and the counter updates as you type. You get five numbers at once: Chinese characters only, characters with punctuation, unique characters, Chinese words, and the total character count. Chinese has no spaces, so the page also explains how counting works.
Useful for essays with a 字数 requirement, social media posts with length limits, and any text where you need the exact Chinese character count. Everything runs in your browser.
Counts update as you type. Nothing leaves your browser.
Live count
0
Chinese characters
0
With punctuation
0
Unique characters
0
Chinese words
0
Total characters (everything, including Latin letters and spaces)
Chinese does not separate words with spaces, and that changes what "counting" means. This page computes three different kinds of count from your text, and each one answers a different question.
Every Chinese character is one unit, no matter how complex it is. 学 and 攀 each count as 1. This is the number Chinese speakers mean by 字数, and it is what school essays and most platform limits use.
A word is one or more characters that carry one meaning: 你好 is one word of two characters. Word count is what translators and language learners usually care about. This page segments your text with your browser's built-in Chinese word breaker.
Fullwidth marks like ，。！？ take the same width as a character and are usually counted with the text. The hanzi count on this page excludes them; the "with punctuation" number includes them, so you can match whichever convention you need.
Three short examples show how the numbers relate. Paste any of them into the box above and you will get the same results.
| Text | Characters | Words | Word breakdown |
|---|---|---|---|
| 你好世界 | 4 | 2 | 你好 / 世界 |
| 我是中国人 | 5 | 2 | 我是 / 中国人 |
| 龙年大吉 | 4 | 3 | 龙 / 年 / 大吉 |
All characters in the CJK Unified Ideographs blocks: simplified 汉字, traditional 漢字, and rarer characters in the Extension blocks. Whether a character has 3 strokes or 30, it still counts as exactly 1.
Chinese punctuation （），。！？、, spaces, Latin letters, digits, emoji and symbols. They appear in the total count, and punctuation appears in the "with punctuation" count, but they never inflate the hanzi number.
Counting characters, by the way, is also how Chinese names are measured: tradition discusses names in strokes and characters, not letters. If you are curious, our Chinese name generator builds full names from hand-picked characters, and the name translation tool shows your own name in hanzi.
Paste your Chinese text into the box at the top of this page. The counter updates as you type and shows the hanzi count (characters only, no punctuation), the count including punctuation, the number of unique characters, the word count and the total character count. Nothing is uploaded: all counting happens in your browser.
It depends on which number you read, and this page shows both. The main hanzi count excludes punctuation marks like ，。！？、；： and counts only Chinese characters. The second number includes Chinese punctuation. This mirrors real life: school essays in China are usually counted with punctuation, while character lists and vocabulary counts exclude it.
Chinese text has no spaces between words, so a "word" is not simply characters separated by spaces. 你好世界 is 4 characters but 2 words (你好 and 世界). This page counts words with the browser built-in Chinese word segmentation, the same technology browsers use for text selection, so both numbers are shown side by side.
Yes, in the total character count, which counts everything including spaces and Latin letters. The hanzi count counts only Chinese characters, and the word count counts Chinese words plus any Latin words. So mixed text like "用 iPhone 拍照" gives: 3 hanzi, 3 words (用, iPhone, 拍照), and 11 total characters including the two spaces.
Yes, the same box does both jobs. Chinese teachers usually ask for 字数 (character count), which is the hanzi count shown first, and essays are typically counted with punctuation included. If you are writing for a platform with a character limit, use the hanzi count for Chinese-only text or the total count for mixed text.
Yes, completely free with no sign-up and no limits on text length. The tool runs entirely in your browser, so your text never leaves your device. If you also need the reading of the text you just counted, paste it into our pinyin translator.