Count Chinese words, not guesses 中文字数统计
Most counters multiply characters by 70% and call it a word count. This one segments your text properly, checks your punctuation, and gives you the translation cost basis.
Chinese word counter
Limits verified July 2026
Send this to a translator
Copies every count plus the per-1,000-character basis translation vendors quote against.
Your counts
Nothing to count yet
Paste Chinese text on the left, drop in a file, or load the sample.
Nothing is uploaded. Every count runs on your device.
Next, check the site this copy is going on
The counter checks the text. These check the page it lands on — the parts that decide whether anyone sees it.
Counting Chinese is not counting English
Chinese has words, just no spaces between them
English gives you word boundaries for free: spaces. Chinese does not. 我今天去了北京 has no gaps in it, but a Chinese reader parses it as four units — 我 / 今天 / 去了 / 北京 — the same way you parse this sentence without thinking about it.
That is why most counters give up and multiply. Take the character count, cut it by 30%, print a number. It is close enough to look right and wrong often enough to matter. A technical manual full of four-character terms and a chat log full of single-character particles land in completely different places, and a fixed multiplier cannot tell them apart.
This tool uses your browser's built-in Unicode segmenter — the same engine that decides where a double-click selects a word. It reads your actual text. If your browser is older and has no segmenter, the tool falls back to the estimate and says so rather than quietly pretending.
What the health score checks
Six checks for Chinese copy
| Check | What it looks for | Threshold |
|---|---|---|
| Platform fit | Total characters against your selected limit | Within limit |
| Punctuation style | Half-width marks sitting against Chinese characters | None |
| Script consistency | Simplified and traditional forms mixed together | One script |
| Sentence length | Average Chinese characters per sentence | Under 55 |
| Character variety | Unique characters as a share of the total | Over 25% |
| Paragraph length | Average characters per paragraph | Under 350 |
How the score works
Checks only appear once there is enough text to judge them fairly — the variety check needs 150 Chinese characters, the paragraph check needs 200. The score is the share of applicable checks you pass, so it never punishes you for writing something short.
BEFORE YOU PUBLISH
- Pick the platform you are posting to — the bar tracks its limit.
- Clear every half-width mark against Chinese text.
- Stick to one script: simplified or traditional.
- Split sentences that run past 55 characters.
- Copy the summary for your translator before you ask for a quote.
Publishing Chinese copy at scale? The punctuation and script checks this tool runs on one block of text, we run across entire sites — alongside the localisation and search work behind them.
Questions people ask
Roughly 550 to 700 Chinese words. Most modern Chinese words are two characters, but one-character and four-character words are common, so the ratio shifts with writing style. This tool segments your actual text instead of applying a fixed multiplier.
Yes. Chinese is written without spaces but still has words. 电脑 is one word — computer — written as two characters with no space. Finding those boundaries is called word segmentation, and it is what this tool does in your browser.
Yes. Chinese copy uses full-width marks, which occupy a full character cell and sit correctly against Han characters. Half-width ASCII commas and periods next to Chinese characters are a typographic error, and this tool flags them and can fix them in one click.
Chinese to English translation is almost always quoted per 1,000 Chinese source characters with punctuation excluded. This tool shows that number directly so you can check a quote before you pay it.
A standard Weibo post allows 2,000 characters, though the timeline collapses anything past about 140. WeChat article titles cap at 64 characters, Xiaohongshu post bodies at 1,000, and Douyin captions at 55.
No. Every count runs in your browser. The text never leaves your device and nothing is stored or logged, which matters if you are pasting a client's unpublished copy.
Yes. Drag a .txt, .md, .srt, .vtt, .csv or .json file onto the text box. Files are read in your browser, not uploaded. Very large files are segmented from a sample and marked as sampled so you know it is an extrapolation.