What Are Characters?

Characters is the total number of individual characters in a document's text. In this field the count normally leaves out the spaces, so it measures the typed signs themselves rather than the length of the line they sit on.

What counts as a character

When talking about writing and documents, a character is any typed sign. It does not have to be a letter. Letters and numbers count, of course, but so does every special character: question marks, commas, periods, brackets, currency symbols and the rest. Accented letters and characters from non-Latin scripts each count as characters too.

The value you find for this field is the total of all of them in the document, excluding spaces. Its companion field, the character count with spaces, is the same total with the blanks added in, and a document that reports both will always show the larger number there.

Where the value comes from

This is a document statistic written by the program that saved the file, most familiarly Microsoft Word, which records a short set of counts inside the document: pages, words, paragraphs and characters. Other office formats store their own equivalents. Nobody types the number in and no camera or encoder is involved. It is simply the application's own tally, frozen at the last save.

That is the one caveat worth carrying. Because the figure is stored rather than recalculated every time a file is opened, a document edited by software that does not maintain these statistics can hold a count that no longer matches its text. Different applications also draw the line in slightly different places over things like footnotes and text inside shapes, so two programs may report two figures for the same file.

Why it matters for your file

Most readers come to this field because something has a length limit. Assignments, submission guidelines and publishing templates are often specified in characters rather than words, and the without-spaces count is the stricter of the two figures.

It is also the field to use for practical checks. Comparing the count across two versions of a document tells you how much the text actually grew, which word counts can hide when the editing was mostly rewriting. A document that reports 0 characters has no text in its body, however full of pictures or diagrams it looks, which quickly explains a file that a search never finds. And reading the number straight from the metadata means you can go through a stack of documents without opening a single one.

There is nothing private in this field. It tells you how much text a document contains, not a word of what that text says.