Character Counter
Live counts for characters, words and sentences — with social media limit checks.
Why character counts matter
Every platform enforces limits, and the punishments differ: X simply blocks the post, Instagram silently truncates your caption behind "…more", and SMS quietly splits into multiple billed messages at 160 characters. Meta descriptions for SEO get cut around 155–160 characters in search results, and most college application essays specify word counts, not pages. Counting before you paste beats counting after you've been cut off.
Characters vs words vs tokens
Character counts include everything — letters, spaces, punctuation. Word counts split on spaces. If you write for AI tools, you'll also meet tokens, which are chunks of roughly four characters. This tool gives you the two classic measures live. Need to make text look empty instead of measuring it? That's our invisible character tool's specialty.
Frequently Asked Questions
How do I count characters in my text?
Type or paste into the box — characters, characters without spaces, words, sentences and paragraphs are counted live as you type. Nothing is uploaded; counting happens in your browser.
What are the character limits for social media?
X (Twitter) posts: 280. Instagram captions: 2,200 (only ~125 shown before "more"). Instagram bio: 150. TikTok captions: 2,200. YouTube titles: 100. SMS: 160 per message. The tool shows live progress against common limits.
Do spaces and emojis count as characters?
Spaces count on virtually every platform. Emojis usually count as at least one character — and on some platforms an emoji counts as two or more, which is why a "280-character" tweet full of emojis fills up faster than expected.
How is the word count calculated?
Words are counted as sequences of characters separated by spaces or line breaks — the same method word processors use. Hyphenated words count as one word.