Count the characters
Paste your text, upload a file, or load the example. Characters with and without spaces, 35 platform limits checked at once, and exactly where your text gets cut off.
Paste or type and the character count updates as you go, with and without spaces at the same time. Then the text is checked against 35 platform targets at once — and, unlike every other character counter we could find, the tool tells you which of those numbers the platform actually publishes and which are conventions somebody invented. Pick one and it shows you where the cut lands. Free, no sign-up, nothing leaves your browser.
Paste, check, trim.
Type, paste, or drop a .docx, .pdf or .txt file onto the editor. Files are read in your browser; nothing is uploaded.
Characters with spaces and without, side by side, plus letters, digits, punctuation and capitals underneath.
All 35 limits at once on the Limits tab, or pick one on the Fit tab and see exactly where your text gets cut off.
It is the first question a character count raises and almost no form answers it. Here is what each figure is for.
A real run, recorded on 19 September 2026. The text is this site’s own meta description, which is the kind of thing people bring to a character counter in the first place.
“Free word counter and character counter. Get a live word count, characters with and without spaces, reading time, six readability formulas and 35 platform limits — all in your browser, with no sign-up.”
201 characters, 169 without spaces, 159 letters, 32 words, one line — and 203 bytes, because the em dash costs three.
Every character counter prints limits. None of the ones we read says where the numbers came from, and some of the most quoted do not exist. So each row here carries its provenance.
| Marked | Means | How many | Examples |
|---|---|---|---|
| Limit | The platform’s own documentation states the number. Checked against it on 26 August 2026 | 11 | X 280 and Premium 25,000 · Instagram caption 2,200 · TikTok 2,200 · Bluesky 300 · YouTube title 100 and description 5,000 · Google Ads 30 and 90 · SMS 160 and 70 |
| Target | Nothing is enforced. The number is a writing convention, and going past it changes how the text looks rather than whether it is accepted | 8 | Google title tag 60 · Meta description 160 · URL slug 75 · Open Graph title 88 · email subject 60 and preheader 90 · a 250-word abstract · a 400-word cover letter |
| Unverified | Widely quoted, but no primary source we could read states it. LinkedIn’s and Facebook’s help centres are closed to crawlers, and Threads’ own API documentation says there is no limit | 16 | Facebook post 63,206 · LinkedIn post 3,000, headline 220, About 2,600 · Threads 500 · Instagram bio 150 · Discord 2,000 · Slack 40,000 |
The two that do not exist are the two most quoted in the industry. Google’s documentation states plainly that there is no limit on the length of a title element, and none on a meta description — both are truncated in search results to fit the device width, measured in pixels. Every SEO counter prints a number anyway, and they do not agree with each other: 55, 60 or 70 for titles; 150, 155, 160 or 300 for descriptions.
A character limit is only half a rule. The other half is which characters, and three platforms are unusual enough to publish it.
Its 300 is 300 grapheme clusters — an emoji with a skin tone is one, not four — with a second ceiling of 3,000 bytes. It is the most human definition on the list, and almost nobody copies it.
Its 2,200 is 2,200 UTF-16 code units, which is what a JavaScript text box measures. An emoji costs two, so a caption full of them runs out sooner than the number suggests.
GSM-7 gives you 160. One character outside that alphabet forces the whole message into UCS-2 and halves it to 70. A curly apostrophe does it. The symbol counter works out the segments.
Everywhere else, plain characters is the safe assumption — and if the text carries emoji or non-Latin script, leave yourself a little room rather than trusting the count to the last digit.
The part a character count is usually leading up to.
Pick a platform and everything past the limit is greyed out in place, so you can read what is about to disappear instead of guessing from a number.
The trim moves back to the last word boundary before the limit. A truncation that ends mid-word is the one thing worse than being over.
The trim is an ordinary edit in your own browser. Ctrl+Z puts it back, and nothing was sent anywhere to begin with.
Three jobs, one number.
One piece of copy, eight places it has to fit. Check it against all of them at once rather than pasting it into eight composers, and find out which of those eight numbers is a real limit and which is a blog post someone wrote in 2014.
Applications, bios, product fields, ad copy. Paste, read the number, trim at a word boundary. If the form rejects text that looks short enough, an invisible character is usually the reason, and the symbol counter finds it.
Titles and meta descriptions, with the honest caveat printed next to the number: Google truncates by pixel width, not by character count, so treat 60 and 160 as writing targets and check how the snippet actually renders.
Four pages, four different questions. They share one engine, so the numbers always agree.
How much did I write? Words, reading time, six readability formulas, keyword frequency, and the limits as a reference table. The place to start if you are writing to a word count.
What are these characters? Four totals that disagree and are all correct, a breakdown by kind, the invisible characters that arrive with pasted text, and SMS segments. The page to open when a count looks wrong.
How did I write it? Every sentence listed, measured and graded, with the repeated openings you cannot hear in your own draft.
What people ask about counting characters online.
Paste your text into the box above. The character count appears in the header and updates on every keystroke, with the figure excluding spaces beside it. Nothing is uploaded and there is no sign-up.
Both, side by side, always. Forms and platforms disagree about which they mean and rarely say, so you should not have to guess or do arithmetic. The report you can download breaks the total down further into letters, digits, punctuation, spaces and capitals.
Yes, with no sign-up and nothing held back for a paid plan. The counting is arithmetic done in your browser, so it costs us nothing to run and there is no reason to meter it.
That is what the Limits tab is for. Your text is checked against all 35 platform targets at once, each with how much room is left or how far over you are. The Fit tab takes one platform and shows exactly where the cut lands, with a button that trims the text there at a whole word.
The tool tells you, which nothing else in this category does. Eleven of the 35 are numbers the platform itself publishes and we checked against its own documentation. Eight are marked Target, meaning nothing is enforced and the figure is a writing convention. Sixteen are marked Unverified, meaning the number is widely quoted but no primary source we could read states it.
No. Google’s own documentation states there is no limit on how long a title element can be, and none for a meta description either. Both are truncated in search results to fit the device width, measured in pixels rather than characters. The 55, 60 and 70-character figures are useful writing targets and nothing more, which is why this tool labels them Target.
280 for a standard X post and 25,000 with X Premium, and those two are numbers X publishes. Bear in mind that a link is counted as a fixed length rather than its real one, and that non-Latin scripts and emoji are not always one character each to the platform.
160 when every character is in the GSM alphabet, or 70 when any one of them is not — a curly apostrophe or an emoji is enough to halve it. Once a message splits, each part carries 153 or 67 because the rest is used to stitch the parts back together. The symbol counter works the segments out for you.
Usually because one of you is counting spaces and the other is not, and neither says so. Beyond that, emoji and accented letters genuinely have more than one correct count: a thumbs-up is one symbol, two characters in a browser text box, one Unicode code point and four bytes. The symbol counter shows all four at once.
It counts them the way a form field does, which is usually two, because that is the number a character limit will actually measure you against. If you need the count a reader would give — one — the symbol counter shows both, along with code points and bytes.
The same tool, looking at a different row. The Counts tab gives a letters-only figure alongside the total, so if you need letters excluding spaces, digits and punctuation, that number is already there.
Yes. Pick the platform on the Fit tab and press Trim to fit. The cut moves back to the last whole word before the limit, and the greyed preview shows you what is about to go before you press it.
Yes — drop a .docx, .pdf or .txt file onto the editor and the text is extracted in your browser. Old .doc files are not supported, so save as .docx first, and a scanned PDF with no text layer comes through empty because there is nothing to extract without OCR.
No. Every count runs in your browser and there is no server call carrying your text anywhere in this tool. Your draft is kept in your own browser storage so a refresh does not lose it, and clearing your browser data removes it.
The word counter answers how much you wrote — words, reading time, readability, keyword frequency — and lists the platform limits as a reference. This page is built around the limits themselves: pick a platform, see the cut, trim to fit, and find out which of those numbers is real. If you are writing to a character budget, start here.
Counting the characters is one job. These are the others.
Free and unmetered, because it runs in your browser. Plan allowances apply only to the AI tools, and they are on the pricing page.
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