Application forms, meta descriptions and social posts all cap the length, and they rarely agree on what counts. This shows every measure at once: characters with and without spaces, words, bytes and manuscript pages.
Counting characters sounds unambiguous until a form rejects text that your editor said was short enough. Korean application forms usually count 공백 포함 — spaces included — while some count 공백 제외; a byte limit is a different measure again, because a Hangul syllable is 3 bytes in UTF-8 and 2 bytes in the EUC-KR encoding that older systems still use. A 1,000-byte field therefore holds about 333 Korean characters, not 1,000.
All of those counts are shown at once, alongside word count, line count and 원고지 sheets at 200 characters each, so you can check the one your form is actually measuring. The text stays in the page; nothing is submitted anywhere, which matters when the thing you are counting is a cover letter.
A byte limit and a character limit diverge sharply for Korean text, and forms rarely say which they mean. In UTF-8 a Hangul syllable takes 3 bytes and an ASCII letter takes 1, so a 1,000-byte field holds about 333 Korean characters or 1,000 English ones. Older systems using EUC-KR store a Hangul syllable in 2 bytes, giving 500 — a different answer for the same text on the same form. Emoji are the extreme case at 4 bytes each, and some are sequences of several code points joined together, so one visible character can cost a dozen bytes.
Word counts are a convention rather than a measurement, and the convention breaks on Korean. Counting whitespace-separated tokens gives 어절 rather than words, and a Korean sentence has fewer of them than an English translation of the same content because particles attach to the noun instead of standing alone. A 500-word English essay and a 500-어절 Korean one are not comparable lengths. Where a limit is stated in words for Korean text, checking the character count as well is the safer reading.
The 원고지 count is here because Korean assignments and competitions still specify length that way: one sheet is 200 squares, and a submission asked for in 매 is asked for in units of 200 characters including spaces and punctuation, each of which occupies its own square. Line and paragraph counts serve the same purpose for the formats that specify those instead. All of it is computed in the page and nothing is submitted anywhere, which matters when the thing being measured is a cover letter or a personal statement.
No. Counting happens in JavaScript in your browser, so an unfinished cover letter or a confidential draft never leaves your machine.
Word counts words by a different rule and may exclude footnotes, headers or text boxes. For character counts the figures normally agree once you match the with-spaces or without-spaces setting.
By splitting on whitespace, which matches how most forms and editors do it. For languages written without spaces, the character count is the meaningful measure rather than the word count.