character counter Tool - Free Online Word Counter
Professional character counter with real-time analysis. Perfect for Google Docs, essays, SEO content, and writing analytics.
Why character count matters more than word count for short-form writing
Word count is the right metric for an essay, a blog post, or a book chapter. For everything shorter — a tweet, an SMS, a meta description, a YouTube title, a product name — the constraint is characters, not words. Getting this wrong is the difference between a message that sends and a message that gets truncated mid-sentence.
This page exists because the character counters built into most tools are either invisible (Google Docs hides it behind two menu clicks), wrong about what counts (some apps don't count emoji correctly), or specific to one platform when you write for several.
Platform character limits worth memorizing
The limits that actually constrain everyday writing:
| Where you're writing |
Limit |
Counts what |
| SMS (single message) |
160 |
Latin script; 70 for messages containing any non-GSM character (Unicode mode) |
| Twitter / X post |
280 |
URLs always count as 23 regardless of actual length |
| Meta description |
155–160 |
What Google displays in search results; longer descriptions get truncated |
Page title (<title>) |
50–60 |
Display limit varies by device; mobile cuts off sooner |
| Instagram caption |
2,200 |
But only the first 125 are shown before "more" |
| LinkedIn post |
3,000 |
Same truncation behavior as Instagram |
| YouTube title |
100 |
Hard limit; the upload will reject longer titles |
| YouTube description |
5,000 |
Hard limit |
| Google Ads headline |
30 |
Per headline; you write three |
These are the numbers that drive real writing decisions. The reason this character counter exists is to let you write to one of these targets — paste a draft and instantly see how far over or under you are.
With spaces vs without spaces — when each matters
Both numbers are shown because they answer different questions.
Count with spaces is what every platform's "character limit" refers to. Twitter's 280 is 280 with spaces. Meta descriptions are 160 with spaces. When you're checking whether your message will fit, this is the only number that matters.
Count without spaces is what professional translation, transcription, and typesetting services bill on. If you're sending a 1,200-word document to a translator who quotes per 1,000 characters without spaces, the no-spaces count is your invoice number. It's also occasionally what academic style guides use to verify shorter assignments — but most modern style guides have moved to word count.
If you don't know which one your platform wants, default to with spaces. That's the convention everywhere except billing for professional language services.
How this counter handles edge cases
A few decisions the counter makes that aren't obvious:
- Line breaks count as one character each. A "shift+enter" soft break and a "return" paragraph break both add 1 to the total, mirroring how Twitter, SMS, and most platforms count them.
- Emoji count as one character. Most modern platforms (post-2017) count emoji as a single character. SMS in Unicode mode is the main exception — there an emoji can consume up to 4 characters of your 70.
- URLs count as their literal length here. This counter shows the actual character count. Twitter rewrites URLs to a fixed 23 characters via t.co, so for tweets, mentally subtract
len(url) - 23 from this counter's result. Other platforms count the literal URL length.
- Trailing whitespace counts. A trailing newline in a copy-paste from a code editor or PDF is a character. If your count seems one or two too high, check for trailing returns.
Tip: paste, don't type
If you want an accurate count, finish the draft in your normal editor, then paste it here. Live typing is fine for short text but the editor of choice (Notion, Bear, Google Docs) usually has better spell-check and autocomplete. Use this page for the check, not for the write.
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