Arabic word and character counter

What it does

This counter is built for Arabic text. Alongside words, characters, sentences and paragraphs, it counts the things that matter for Arabic and that a general counter ignores: diacritics (the vowel and doubling marks from U+064B to U+0652), the tatweel stretching character ـ, Arabic and Latin letters separately, and digits by system, Western, Arabic-Indic and Eastern Arabic-Indic.

It also estimates reading time at an Arabic reading speed rather than an English one, tells you how many SMS parts the text would need, and lists the most used words with an option to group spelling variants together.

How to use it

1. Paste or type your Arabic text.
2. Leave the reading speed at 138 words per minute, or set your own.
3. Keep "Group word forms" on to count كتاب and كِتَاب, or أحمد and احمد, as the same word.
4. Read the stats, then copy the summary if you need to share the numbers.

How to read the result

"Words" splits the total into Arabic and Latin words, useful for bilingual copy where a brief sets limits per language. "Characters" gives three figures: everything, without spaces, and without diacritics or tatweel. Use the last one when a limit is about visible letters, and the first when a system counts every character, as databases, form fields and SMS do.

"Diacritics" shows how heavily the text is marked, as marks per 100 Arabic letters. Web copy usually marks only the words that could be misread. Fully marked text, such as children's material or religious text, needs more line height, and the "Diacritics by type" table shows which marks appear.

Reading time uses 138 words per minute, the Arabic average in the study above, rather than an English rate. A 600-word Arabic page takes a little over four minutes at that speed.

"SMS parts" applies the Unicode rule that phone networks use for Arabic: 70 characters in a single message and 67 per part once it is split. A message just over 70 characters goes out as two parts, and providers such as Twilio bill per part, so trimming a few words can matter for a large send.

For English text, the word and character counter uses English reading speeds. Writing and laying out Arabic content that reads well on screen is part of our Arabic and multilingual website service.