Free Character Counter
Count characters, words, sentences, and paragraphs. Check against platform limits instantly.
How character counting actually works
A character counter is stricter than a word counter: it counts every letter, number, punctuation mark, and space individually, rather than grouping them into words. That precision matters anywhere a system enforces a hard limit rather than a soft guideline — a text message, a tweet, a meta description, or a form field that truncates or rejects input past a certain length.
Three details trip people up. First, spaces count: "cat" is 3 characters but "a cat" is 5. This tool shows both totals (with and without spaces) because some platforms and style guides measure one or the other. Second, emoji and other multi-byte Unicode characters can count as more than one character depending on the system doing the counting — iOS Messages and Twitter/X, for example, count most emoji as 2 characters, while a simple JavaScript .length check might count a single emoji as 2 "code units" even though it displays as one glyph. Third, line breaks and extra whitespace are still characters, which is why a block of text with lots of blank lines can run up a higher character count than its word count would suggest.
Why not just count words?
Word count and character count answer different questions. Word count is the better measure of how long something takes to read or write — it's what teachers, editors, and content briefs usually ask for. Character count is the better measure of whether a piece of text will fit: SMS segments, tweet limits, meta titles and descriptions, ad headlines, and database fields are all defined in characters, not words, because that's what the underlying system actually stores and displays.
Character limits across the platforms we track
Every platform sets its character limits differently, and several enforce more than one limit depending on where the text appears (a post vs. a bio vs. an ad). Here's a quick reference for the limits built into the counter above, plus a few more we cover in dedicated guides:
| Platform / field | Limit |
|---|---|
| X (Twitter) post | 280 characters |
| SMS (standard) | 160 characters per segment |
| LinkedIn post | 3,000 characters (truncates ~210) |
| Instagram caption | 2,200 characters |
| Facebook post | 63,206 characters (truncates ~477) |
| TikTok caption | 2,200 characters |
| YouTube description | 5,000 characters |
| Google Ads headline | 30 characters |
See the social media character limits reference for the full per-field breakdown on X, Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook, TikTok, YouTube and every major ad format.