Count characters, letters, and spaces in any text.
The Character Counter counts the characters in your text as you type and shows them against the length limits people hit most: 280 for an X post, 160 for an SMS, about 60 for a Google title, 160 for a meta description, 100 for a YouTube title, 2,200 for an Instagram caption, 3,000 for a LinkedIn post and 477 for the visible part of a Facebook post. It also shows characters without spaces, letters, digits, spaces, line breaks, tabs and the size in UTF-8 bytes. Everything is counted in your browser and nothing is uploaded.
Made for writers and students. Typical uses:
Typing "Hello, world!" gives 13 characters, 12 without spaces, 10 letters, 1 space and 13 bytes. A 150-character product blurb shows green against the 160-character SMS and meta description limits but red against the 60-character title limit, with 90 characters over.
Platform limits change and some platforms count links, emoji or hashtags differently, so treat the bars as a guide and check the platform when the limit matters. Search engines cut titles by pixel width, not by characters, so about 60 characters is a safe target and not a guarantee.
Accuracy: Results follow documented rules and are tested with known inputs. Review the output before relying on it.
Expert Tip
Put the important words first. If a platform or search engine cuts your text, it removes the end, so the first 50 to 60 characters should make sense on their own.
A character count sounds exact, but computers have several ways of counting. The Character Counter counts what you see: an accented letter is one character, and so is an emoji, even though a computer may store them in two or more bytes. It also reports the number of bytes in UTF-8, because some systems, such as databases, SMS gateways and APIs, limit bytes rather than visible characters.
The tool shows the total, the count without spaces, letters, digits, spaces, line breaks, tabs and bytes, all updated as you type.
Under the numbers, a progress bar compares your length with eight common limits, turning amber near the limit and red once you are over, with the excess shown.
Platforms change their limits and count some things differently. A link may count as a fixed number of characters on one network and its full length on another, and an emoji can count as two. Search engines truncate titles by pixel width rather than characters, so about 60 characters is a safe target, not a guarantee. Check the platform's own help page when the limit matters.
For titles and descriptions in search results, meta titles, descriptions and schema markup explains how snippets are built, and the Meta Title Generator estimates pixel width.
A plain English letter takes one byte in UTF-8, an accented letter two, a Chinese character three and an emoji four. That is why a message that looks short can be too long for a field that limits bytes. If you need every measurement of a string, including UTF-16 units and code points, use the String Length Calculator.
Write the full version first, then cut. Remove filler words, replace phrases with single words, and drop repeated ideas. Keep the important words at the start in case the platform truncates the rest. The Word Counter helps when the limit is in words, and the Case Converter fixes capitalisation once the text fits.
A single SMS holds 160 characters when it uses the basic GSM character set. If the message contains an emoji or some accented letters, the phone switches to a different encoding and one message then holds only 70 characters. Longer messages are split into several parts, and each part is slightly shorter (153 characters in the basic set and 67 in the other) because every part carries a small header. If you send business messages, keep them plain and well under the limit, and check how your provider counts parts.
Typical lengths for essays, articles, meta descriptions, social posts and speeches, plus how reading time and speaking time are calculated.
Explore more in Text Tools, read the guides and articles, or see how we test our tools.
Count words, characters, sentences, and paragraphs in any text.
Best for checking word count for essays, articles, and blog posts
Calculate the length of any string including spaces and special characters.
Best for checking a username or field value fits a database column's maximum length
Convert text to uppercase, lowercase, title case, sentence case, and more.
Best for converting titles and headlines to title case
Generate SEO-optimized title tags for your web pages.
Best for drafting a title for a new page from a keyword
Generate SEO-optimized meta descriptions for your web pages.
Best for drafting a starting-point meta description for a new blog post