Character Counter – Count Characters, Words and SMS Messages

How to use the character counter

1. Type or paste your text into the box.
2. Read the character count — with and without spaces — as you type.
3. Optionally enter your own limit to see how many characters you have left, or how far over you are.

Below the main figure you’ll find the number of words, sentences and lines, letters and digits, the size in bytes (UTF-8) and how many SMS messages the text would take. The table compares your text with common limits on social media and search results.

How characters are counted

The counter uses Unicode grapheme clusters — what a reader would call one character. That matters for:

• Emoji such as 👋🏽, which are built from two or more code points but look like one symbol.
• Accented letters that can be stored as a letter plus a combining accent.
• Indian and other scripts, where a visible syllable can be several code points.

Bytes are counted in UTF-8, the encoding used on the web. Plain English letters take one byte each, accented European letters two, most Indian and Asian characters three, and emoji four. Databases and APIs that limit size in bytes rather than characters need this figure.

Example

“Hello world 👋🏽” followed by a new line and “Second line.” has 26 characters, 4 words and 2 lines. The emoji counts once.

SMS messages explained

Text messages use one of two encodings:

• GSM-7, a basic alphabet of Latin letters, digits and common symbols: up to 160 characters in one message, or 153 per part when split.
• Unicode (UCS-2) for everything else: only 70 characters, or 67 per part.

A single emoji or curly apostrophe can switch a message to Unicode and more than double the number of parts — and the cost, if you send messages in bulk. The counter tells you which encoding your text needs.

Character limits to know

• Page title: about 60 characters before search engines truncate it.
• Meta description: about 150–160 characters.
• X post: 280 characters.
• Instagram caption: 2,200 characters, but only the first line or two show before “more”.
• LinkedIn post: 3,000 characters.
• YouTube title: 100 characters.

Limits change from time to time, and each platform counts slightly differently, so treat the table as a guide.

Tips for writing to a limit

• Put the important words first — truncated text loses the end.
• Cut filler words like “very”, “really” and “in order to”.
• Use numbers instead of words (“5” rather than “five”).
• Check line breaks: each one counts as a character.

For counting words, reading time and keyword density, use the word counter. To tidy pasted text first, try remove extra spaces, and to change capital letters, the case converter.