How to count words and characters in Arabic text

What gets counted

• Words: boundaries follow the Unicode rules built into your browser, not just a count of spaces.
• Characters: each letter as the eye sees it, marks included.
• Characters without spaces.
• Lines and paragraphs.

Why characters and bytes differ

In the common UTF-8 encoding, an English letter takes one byte while an Arabic letter takes two. So some systems that claim a limit of 160 “characters” are really counting bytes, and they reject Arabic text far shorter than the limit. The tool shows you both numbers separately and never mixes them up.

How diacritics affect the count

The tool counts a letter together with its marks as one character, the way a person reads it. If the system you are sending to counts symbols instead, you may need to strip the diacritics first with the Arabic diacritic remover.

How to do it

1. Open the Word and character counter.
2. Paste or type your text. The numbers update as you type.
3. Read the word, character and line counts, and the size in bytes.

Why your word processor might disagree

• Every program applies its own rules for word boundaries, so counts can differ slightly between tools, especially around punctuation and numbers.
• An abbreviation followed by a name, like “Dr. Smith” or «د. أحمد», may count as the end of a sentence, because the rule does not know abbreviations.
• Repeated spaces do not add to the word count. To clean them up, use the Whitespace cleaner.

To compare two versions of the same text and see what was added or removed, use Text comparison.