Character Counter
Count characters with and without spaces, plus words and lines.
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The Character Counter reports four numbers for any text you paste: total characters, characters without spaces, words and lines. It is most useful when a platform or form enforces a character limit, from an SMS or a meta description to an Instagram bio or a job application box.
What each figure counts
- Characters: every character, including spaces, tabs and line breaks. This is the number shown in the main result.
- No spaces: the same text with all spaces, tabs and line breaks removed.
- Words: groups of characters separated by whitespace. A URL or "#4521" counts as one word.
- Lines: the number of line breaks plus one. Blank lines count, and a line break at the very end adds one more line.
Example: a two-line delivery message "Order #4521 shipped!" followed by "Track: https://x.co/a" gives 42 characters, 38 without spaces, 5 words and 2 lines. The difference of 4 is the three spaces plus the line break.
Emoji and Indian scripts count differently from what you see
The counter measures characters the way JavaScript and many web forms store them, in UTF-16 code units. For plain English one visible letter is one unit, but not always:
- Most emoji count as 2: "Hi 😀" is 5 characters, not 4. Flags and family or skin-tone emoji are built from several emoji joined together and can count 4 to 11 or more.
- Hindi and other Indic scripts combine consonants, vowel signs and the halant, so "नमस्ते" counts as 6 characters although it looks like three syllables.
Many websites that enforce limits in the browser count the same way, so this number is usually what their counter shows too.
Common character limits
| Where | Limit |
|---|---|
| X (Twitter) post | 280, with some characters counted double |
| Instagram bio | 150 |
| Instagram caption | 2,200 |
| YouTube video title | 100 |
| LinkedIn post | 3,000 |
| One SMS in English | 160 |
| One SMS with Hindi text or emoji | 70 |
The SMS difference catches many people out. A message containing even one character outside the basic GSM alphabet, such as an emoji or a Devanagari letter, switches to Unicode encoding and each SMS part then holds only 70 characters. For X, where links, emoji and many symbols are weighted, the tweet character counter is the more precise check.
Writing to a limit
For search snippets, Google cuts titles and meta descriptions by pixel width rather than a fixed count, so aim for roughly 50 to 60 characters for a title and about 150 to 160 for a description, then check the preview. When a form limit is strict, trim spaces after punctuation last; cutting a whole redundant phrase saves far more. If the limit is in words rather than characters, as with essays, the essay word counter adds sentence and paragraph counts.