Count characters with and without spaces, plus words, sentences and lines, with live limits for social posts and SEO, right in your browser.
The Character Counter shows you exactly how many characters are in your text — both including and excluding spaces — along with word, sentence, line, and paragraph counts. Everything updates as you type, so there's no button to click and no waiting.
Below the stats, four live limit bars compare your current character count against the most common real-world limits: an X/Twitter post (280), an SMS message (160), a meta description (160), and an SEO title tag (60). Each bar turns red the moment you exceed that limit, making it easy to spot when you need to trim. Your text never leaves your browser — all counting runs locally in JavaScript.
Paste a tweet draft, your meta description, an SMS, or any other piece of text. You can also write directly — the counts update on every keystroke.
The six stat cards update instantly. Look at the limit bars below them to see whether your text fits within the social or SEO limits you care about. Red means you've gone over.
Trim or rewrite directly in the box until the bar you need turns from red to green. Hit "Copy text" to grab the final version.
Your text never leaves your browser, nothing is uploaded.
Every metric recalculates instantly as you type.
See how you measure against social and SEO limits.
Fast and responsive on desktop, tablet and mobile.
Paste your draft and watch the limit bar. If you're over, try cutting filler words or replacing long URLs with a link shortener. Threads can help if you genuinely need more space.
A standard SMS is 160 characters. Going over means your message splits into two segments — both get sent but recipients see them separately. Watch the bar to keep it in one piece.
Google displays roughly 150–160 characters of your meta description in search results. Longer text gets cut off with an ellipsis. Aim for 140–155 characters to stay safe across different screen widths.
Google typically displays up to 600px worth of title text in search results, which works out to roughly 50–60 characters in a typical font. Keep titles under 60 characters to avoid truncation.
Google Search ads allow 30 characters per headline and 90 characters per description line. Paste your ad copy here to check both limits before submitting to the Ads interface.
Job application forms, university applications, and social media bios often have character caps. Paste your response here and check before pasting into the form — avoid the frustration of being cut off mid-sentence.
Here are a few real counts so you know what to expect. The sentence The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog. is 44 characters with spaces and 36 characters without. That single line already eats a third of an SMS segment.
A meta description like Free online character counter with live limits for tweets, SMS, titles and meta descriptions. No signup, works in your browser. lands at 131 characters — comfortably inside Google's 150–160 range, so nothing gets clipped in search results.
A title tag such as Character Counter — Count Characters Online Free is 48 characters, which stays under the 60-character mark where Google starts truncating. Paste your own text above and the limit bars will show exactly where you stand.
On X/Twitter every link is counted as 23 characters no matter how long it is. If your draft looks under the limit here but gets rejected there, a URL is usually the reason.
A 160-character SMS is not 160 words. If a form says "160 characters max," it means letters, spaces and punctuation combined — roughly 25 to 30 English words.
Spaces at the end of a line and blank lines between paragraphs all count as characters. A copied block from a document often carries hidden whitespace that pushes you over a tight limit.
Some systems count spaces, some don't; some treat an emoji as one character, others as two. Check whether the limit you're aiming for means "characters" or "characters without spaces" before you trim.
Aim for a few characters under the hard limit. For meta descriptions, 140–155 characters is safer than pushing right up to 160, since Google measures pixel width and wider letters get cut sooner.
If a limit might truncate your text, put the key message first. A title or description that gets cut off should still make sense from the part that shows.
Some databases and legacy forms count only non-space characters. When a field feels stricter than it should, glance at the "No spaces" number instead of the main total.
Write and trim in the counter first, then copy the finished text into the form or app. It's easier to edit against a live count than to fix a message after a platform has already rejected it.
Yes, completely free — no account, no ads blocking the tool, no character limit on what you paste. It works on any device.
"Characters" counts every character in your text, including spaces, line breaks, and punctuation. "No spaces" removes all whitespace before counting. Some systems (like certain databases or older APIs) quote character limits that exclude spaces, which is what "No spaces" is for.
Yes. Everything runs as JavaScript in your browser. Your text is never sent to a server, never logged, and never stored anywhere on our end.
The bar turns red when your character count exceeds that platform's limit. For SMS, going over 160 characters means your message will be split into multiple segments. For meta descriptions and title tags, exceeding the limit means search engines will truncate your text with an ellipsis in results.
URLs are automatically shortened to 23 characters by Twitter, regardless of their actual length. If your tweet includes a URL, Twitter counts it as 23 characters. So a tweet with a URL and 260 other characters would actually be at the limit, not 283 characters. Emojis can also count as 2 characters in some encodings.
Most emoji count as 1 character in JavaScript's string length, but some complex emoji (like skin tone modifiers or flags) consist of multiple Unicode code points and may count as 2 or more. This matches how most web platforms count emoji — X/Twitter, for example, counts most emoji as 2 characters.
Once the page has loaded, the counting runs entirely in your browser, so it keeps working even if your connection drops. Nothing is sent anywhere while you type.
Word and this tool both count characters, but they can differ on how they treat things like non-breaking spaces, footnotes, or text inside shapes. For plain text pasted straight in, the numbers match. If you're counting a full Word document, small differences usually come from hidden formatting.
Yes. Accented letters, Cyrillic, Arabic, and Chinese characters are all counted. Note that a single Chinese or Japanese character is one character here, but some platforms count it as two "bytes" for their limits — check the platform's own rules if you're near the edge.
There's no fixed cap. You can paste anything from a one-line tweet to a full article and the counts update instantly. Very large pastes (tens of thousands of characters) may take a moment on older devices, but nothing gets truncated.
Yes. Each line break counts as a character in the main total. If you're pasting into a field that strips line breaks, expect its count to be slightly lower than what you see here.