Character Counter

How to Use This Tool

1. 1

   Paste or type your text

   The counts update with every keystroke.

2. 2

   Set a character target

   Enter the limit you are writing to — 160 for a meta description, 280 for a post on X — to see progress as a percentage.

3. 3

   Read both counts

   Characters with spaces is what most limits count; without spaces is useful for some forms and translation quotes.

4. 4

   Trim and re-check

   Edit in the box until you are inside the limit, then copy the text out.

With Spaces or Without?

Almost every real-world limit counts spaces. Meta descriptions, title tags, tweets, ad headlines and database fields all treat a space as a character like any other, so the with-spaces figure is the one to check against a stated limit.

The without-spaces count is useful in narrower situations: some academic and translation work prices by character excluding whitespace, and certain legacy systems count differently. If you are not in one of those cases, use the with-spaces number.

Line breaks also count as characters, which surprises people pasting multi-line text into a single-line field. A paragraph break can consume one or two characters depending on the system, and those are included in the with-spaces total here.

The Limits Worth Knowing

• Title tag — roughly 60 characters before Google truncates, though the real limit is pixel-based.
• Meta description — roughly 155–160 characters on desktop, nearer 120 on mobile.
• Alt text — no hard limit, but around 125 characters is the practical guideline for screen readers.
• Google Ads headline — 30 characters; description — 90 characters.
• URL slug — no fixed limit, but shorter reads better in results and when shared.

Why Character Limits Are Really Pixel Limits

Search engines truncate based on rendered width, not character count. A title of sixty narrow characters like “illillillill” occupies far less space than sixty wide ones like “WWWMMMWWW”, so two titles of identical length can truncate at different points.

Character counts are a proxy for width, and a decent one for ordinary prose. Where they mislead is at the extremes: heavy use of capitals, wide letters like W and M, or emoji will truncate earlier than the count suggests.

For anything appearing in search results, remember that Google truncates by pixel width rather than character count, so a title full of wide letters is cut earlier than one full of narrow ones. Treat character counts as a guide and check the live result once the page is indexed.

Emoji, Accents and What Counts as One Character

Not every visible character is one unit of storage. Emoji are frequently two units internally, and emoji with skin-tone modifiers or gender variants can be four or more. Accented letters may be one character or two depending on how the text was encoded.

This matters when a limit is enforced by a system rather than by visual truncation. A tweet or a database field counting internal units may reject text that looks well within the limit to you.

For SEO fields this rarely matters, since truncation is visual. For form fields, API payloads and database columns, leave a margin rather than writing right up to the stated maximum.

Practical Uses

• Trimming a meta description to fit before pasting it into your CMS.
• Checking ad copy against a platform's headline and description limits.
• Confirming alt text stays within the screen-reader guideline.
• Fitting copy into a fixed design space such as a hero heading or card.
• Checking a bio or profile blurb against a platform limit before it silently truncates.

Related Checks Worth Running

If you are writing rather than trimming, the Word Counter gives the same text's word count, sentence count and reading time, which is more useful for judging whether an article is substantial enough.

For the specific job of writing search snippets to length, the Meta Description Generator and SEO Title Generator both produce output already sized to their limits, with counts shown per variant.

Social Media Character Limits

• X (Twitter) — 280 characters for standard accounts; paid accounts can post much longer.
• Instagram — 2,200 characters for a caption, though only the first line or two show before “more”.
• LinkedIn — 3,000 characters for a post.
• Facebook — posts can be very long, but short posts get more engagement and less truncation.
• TikTok and YouTube — limits differ for captions, titles and descriptions; the Social Media Character Counter checks each field against its platform limit.

SMS: Why 160 Characters Sometimes Becomes 70

A standard text message holds 160 characters — but only when every character belongs to the basic GSM alphabet of Latin letters, digits and common punctuation. Add one emoji, a curly quote, or a letter from Urdu, Arabic or Chinese, and the whole message switches to Unicode encoding, which fits only 70 characters per message.

Longer messages are split into segments of 153 characters, or 67 in Unicode, and each segment is billed separately by most SMS providers. If you are writing bulk SMS, one stray emoji can double the cost.

Counting Characters in Word and Google Docs

Microsoft Word shows characters with and without spaces under Review → Word Count, or by clicking the word count in the status bar. Google Docs has the same figures under Tools → Word count, or Ctrl+Shift+C (Cmd+Shift+C on a Mac).

Select part of the text first to count just that selection. Both editors count the same way this tool does for ordinary text, though emoji and some symbols can be counted differently.

Frequently Asked Questions

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