Why does wc increase character count by 1 ?

[Manish Jain]

Hi,

echo "abc 123" | wc -c

I would expect wc to output 7, but actually I get 8.

Indeed, I see similar behaviour with 'echo | wc -c'
This should produce 0, but I get 1

What might be the problem ? Thanks for any tips.
Manish Jain