Character Counter
Type or paste below and watch every count update live, with limits for X, Instagram, SMS and SEO tags built in.
Against common limits
Why character limits matter
Almost every box you type into online has a ceiling. Overshoot it and your post is rejected, your headline is cut off mid-word in search results, or a single text message quietly becomes three. This counter tracks characters with and without spaces, words and lines the instant you type, and measures your text against the limits people bump into most.
The limits built in
- X / Twitter post - 280 characters. Links count as 23 whatever their length.
- Instagram caption - 2,200 characters, though only the first 125 or so show before the "more" link.
- SMS text message - 160 characters for a single GSM message; emoji force Unicode and drop that to 70.
- Meta description - 155 to 160 characters before Google truncates it in results.
- Title tag - roughly 60 characters, or about 600 pixels, before the search snippet is clipped.
Each bar shows how many characters you have left and turns red the moment you go over, so you can trim with confidence rather than guessing.
Characters vs words
Social and SEO limits are almost always in characters, while essays and articles are set in words - an average English word runs about five characters plus a space, so 100 words is roughly 600 characters. If you need words, sentences and reading time instead, the word counter does that. To reshape the text itself, try the case converter or the line break remover for copy pasted out of a PDF.
A note on emoji
Emoji and many accented or non-Latin letters are made of more than one code unit, so a naive character count can over-count them. This tool counts by Unicode grapheme where the browser supports it, so a single emoji reads as one character - matching what you see rather than the raw byte length.