Free Character Counter

The character counter counts characters the way a reader sees them, so an accented letter such as é is one character and an emoji with a skin tone is one character, even though each is stored as more than one code. A line break counts as one character, whether it came from Windows, Mac or Linux.

• Characters: every visible character, plus every space and line break.
• Without spaces: the same count with spaces, tabs and line breaks left out.
• Words: runs of letters and digits in any alphabet. Contractions such as don't and hyphenated words such as well-known count as one word, and so do numbers such as 3.5 or 2,000. Emoji and punctuation are not words.
• Sentences end at a period, question mark or exclamation mark, but not after common abbreviations such as Dr. or e.g. Paragraphs are separated by blank lines.
• Reading time assumes 238 words a minute and speaking time 140 words a minute.
• UTF-8 bytes: the size of the text when it is saved or sent as UTF-8, the encoding nearly every web page and database uses.

The counts change on every keystroke. A pasted text of a few hundred thousand characters is counted in a moment, because the counter makes one pass over it.

Usually, yes. When a platform, form or editor gives a character count limit, it almost always counts spaces and line breaks, which is why this counter shows the count with spaces first and checks every platform limit against it.

The count without spaces is for the cases that ask for it: some translation and copywriting rates are quoted per character without spaces, and some school and publishing guidelines set their length that way. A typical English text has about one space for every five or six characters, so the two counts differ by roughly a sixth.

The limits below are the ones marketers run into every day. Each one in the tool links to the page it was checked against and shows the date it was last checked. Where a platform publishes the number, the tool uses the platform's own figure. Where it publishes none, as for Google's title width or LinkedIn's headline, the tool uses the figure most guides cite and says so.

A cut-off is not a limit. A LinkedIn post can run to 3,000 characters, but the feed shows only the first lines before a "see more" link, and an Instagram caption is cut after about 125 characters in the feed. The tool marks both points, because the words before them are the only ones most people read.

Google cuts titles and descriptions in search results by width on the screen, not by number of characters. A title of narrow letters such as i and l fits far more characters than a title in capitals, so a character count alone can say a title fits when it does not.

Google publishes no length for either. It says it shortens them to fit the device. About 600 pixels for a desktop title and about two lines for a description are the widths most guides cite, and the counter estimates the width of your text from the letter widths of Arial, the font Google uses for results. Treat the result as a close estimate: Google changes its layout from time to time, and it can rewrite a title or description it judges a poor match for the search.

One SMS holds 160 characters, but only when every character is in the GSM-7 alphabet: the English letters, digits, common punctuation and a set of accented letters such as é, ü and ñ. Characters from its extension table, such as €, [, ] and {, count as two.

A single character outside that alphabet changes the whole message to UCS-2, which holds only 70 characters. One emoji does it, and so does a curly quote or apostrophe pasted from a word processor, which is the most common reason a short text costs two messages. The counter shows which encoding your text needs, so you can find the character that switched it.

A longer text is sent as several parts that the phone joins back together. Each part loses a little room to the header that joins them, so parts hold 153 GSM-7 characters or 67 UCS-2 characters. A message of 161 GSM-7 characters is two parts, and since carriers and SMS services usually bill per part, that one extra character can double the cost.

X allows 280 characters in a post, but it weighs them. Latin letters, digits and basic punctuation count as one, while each emoji, each Chinese, Japanese or Korean character, and most symbols outside Latin script, such as € or …, count as two, so a post in Japanese holds about 140 characters. An emoji made of several joined parts, such as a person with a skin tone, still counts as two.

X also shortens every link to 23 characters, whatever its length. The counter does not shorten links, so a post with a long link has more room on X than the bar shows.

UTF-8 bytes measure how much storage a text takes, which is what some systems limit instead of characters. An English letter is one byte, an accented letter such as é is two, the euro sign is three and an emoji is usually four.

The byte count matters when a database column, an API field or a file format sets its limit in bytes. A text of 255 characters can be well over 255 bytes once it has accents or emoji, and a system that counts bytes may cut it off mid-word.