Since written Chinese are composed of Chinese characters, there is no such thing as Chinese word count, but there is a Chinese character count. But this, of course, is not the only reason. The point is that Chinese text may include not only a word consisting of several Chinese characters but also a sentence or a phrase that consists of several Chinese characters not separated by spaces. Thus, without understanding the context, it is technically challenging to determine the word count.

In modern Chinese, most words consist of two or more characters. Another exciting feature of Chinese characters is that a character corresponds to a single syllable that is also a word (or a part of a word) with meaning. Chinese writing differs from alphabetic or syllabic in that it includes a much larger number of characters — tens of thousands. But let’s not stray too far from the topic of Chinese word count, or as you already know — Chinese character count.

One of the easiest ways to count characters in Chinese text is to use Microsoft Word. MS Word has a significant advantage over many other programs since Word is localized for many languages ​​and will not show you word count statistics pulled out of a hat.