About WordCounts
Built by Naveed Qadir, a software engineer who turns recurring web and mobile problems into focused tools that are easier to understand and use.
Who I am
My name is Naveed Qadir. I am a software engineer working across web and mobile applications. I focus on practical solutions: understand where a real task becomes confusing or unnecessarily difficult, then build something that makes the next step clearer. The best tools, to me, are not complicated for the sake of looking impressive. They quietly remove friction and help someone finish the work they came to do.
WordCounts follows that approach. I designed and maintain the tools, the counting logic and the supporting guides myself. The aim is to give writers, developers, marketers and anyone completing a limited text field a result they can understand and use, not just another number on a screen.
I run this site on my own. There is no team, no editorial board and no company behind it. When something is wrong, the contact page reaches me directly at charactercounterrs@gmail.com.
The problems that led to this site
I built this site after looking closely at why character limits cause trouble. The web already has plenty of counters, but a bare total often does not answer the question a person actually has: “Why does this text fit here but fail there?” The difficulty comes from several different counting systems being presented as if they were the same thing.
- One visible symbol can have several technical lengths. A family emoji looks like one character, but it is made from several Unicode code points and even more UTF-16 code units. A counter can therefore be internally correct and still disagree with what the person sees or what a form enforces.
- One character can change the cost and length of an SMS. A curly quotation mark, a non-Latin letter or an emoji can switch an entire message from GSM-7 to Unicode. The single-message capacity then changes from 160 units to 70, and a text that looked safely short can be sent as several segments.
- Copied text can contain characters that are hard to see. Line breaks, tabs, non-breaking spaces, zero-width characters and typographic punctuation can make a form report a different total from a document editor. Deleting an ordinary space does not necessarily remove the character causing the mismatch.
- Every destination has its own rule. X uses weighted counting, web form fields commonly use UTF-16 length, SMS uses encoding units and search results are constrained by rendered width rather than a published character maximum. A universal total cannot promise an exact match for all of them.
- The text may be private. People count job applications, customer messages, product copy and unpublished writing. None of that content needs to be uploaded merely to calculate its length.
My solution was to keep the tool simple while making the explanation precise: lead with the visible-character count, keep code points, code units and bytes available, apply documented platform rules where they exist, explain uncertainty where they do not, and process the text locally. That is what the tools here do, and it is why I built them.
What this site does
WordCounts has two tools. The Character Counter tells you how long a piece of text is in characters, words, sentences, paragraphs and lines, and how it measures up against a limit, with the Unicode code points, UTF-16 units and UTF-8 bytes beside the visible count. The SMS Character Counter works out the encoding of a text message, which characters forced it into Unicode, and how many segments it will be sent as.
Around those tools are a set of guides, a page that documents exactly how each number is calculated, and a reference table of platform limits with a source and a review date for every entry.
Where it is useful
- Writing posts for X, LinkedIn, Instagram or any platform with a hard limit.
- Filling in application forms, bios and personal statements with a character cap.
- Writing page titles and meta descriptions that have to fit a search result.
- Checking a marketing or transactional SMS before it is sent to thousands of people.
- Debugging a field that rejects text that “should fit”, by comparing visible characters with code units and bytes.
- Keeping ad copy, push notifications and app store text within their limits.
Why your text never leaves your browser
People paste all sorts of things into a counter: job applications, unpublished copy, customer messages, personal notes. None of that needs to go to a server to be counted, so it does not. Both tools run entirely in your browser. The text is not uploaded, logged, stored or included in analytics.
That decision also keeps the site simple. It is a set of static files with no database, no accounts and no server-side processing. The privacy policy describes what the site does collect about visits, which is separate from the text you enter.
Why it stays focused
There are many sites offering a hundred text utilities, each on its own thin page. This is deliberately not one of them. Word counts, sentence counts, reading time and limit checks all live inside the one counter, where they are useful, instead of being split into near-identical pages. SMS has its own tool because it genuinely works differently.
Two tools, documented properly, are easier to keep correct than a hundred.
How the method is documented and tested
- How We Count defines every figure and marks the ones that are estimates. Its example tables are generated by the counting code itself when the site is built.
- The counting code is covered by automated tests, including emoji sequences, combining accents, line-break variants and SMS segment boundaries.
- Platform limits come from a single data file with a source link and a “last verified” date for each entry. A limit that cannot be confirmed from an official source is not listed.
- Each guide lists the sources it relies on and states how it was produced. The editorial policy explains the process, including where AI assistance was used.
Who publishes it
WordCounts is published and maintained by Naveed Qadir. You can reach me through the contact page.
The site may carry advertising to cover its running costs. Advertising has no influence on how the tools count or on what the guides say, and ads are never placed beside the tools’ controls.
Corrections
If a count looks wrong, a limit is out of date or a guide contains an error, please say so. The contact page explains what to include so the problem can be reproduced. Confirmed mistakes are fixed and, where they affected what a guide said, noted on the guide.