About the Character Counter
A character counter is the fastest way to find out whether a piece of text will survive a platform's hard limit. This one reports characters with spaces, characters without spaces, words, lines and the number of SMS parts your message would be split into, then lays those figures against the limits that actually bite: a 280-character post on X, a 60-character meta title, a 160-character meta description, a 2,200-character Instagram caption and a single 160-character SMS. Everything is computed locally as you type, so pasting draft ad copy or customer messages carries no privacy risk.
How to use the Character Counter
- 1
Paste or type your text into the 'Your text' box.
- 2
Read the Counts panel for characters with spaces, characters without spaces, words, lines and SMS parts.
- 3
Scroll to the 'Against common limits' table to see how many characters you have left, or how far over you are, for each platform.
- 4
Trim or expand the text until the Remaining column shows a comfortable margin rather than zero.
What people use it for
Writing meta titles and descriptions
Google renders roughly 580 pixels of title text, which works out at about 60 characters for typical wording. The limit table flags the moment you cross it so the tail of your title is not replaced by an ellipsis.
Costing SMS and OTP campaigns
Bulk SMS providers bill per message part, so a 165-character alert costs double a 155-character one. The SMS parts figure tells you when a small rewrite halves your send cost.
Fitting form and database fields
Legacy systems often cap a field at 255 characters. Check a product description or address line here before an import fails halfway through.
Why SMS messages break at 153 characters
A standard SMS carries 140 bytes of payload. Using the GSM 03.38 seven-bit alphabet, those 140 bytes hold 160 characters, which is where the famous limit comes from. When a message runs longer, the network does not send a longer SMS; it splits the text into several messages and adds a User Data Header to each so the handset can reassemble them in order. That header consumes six bytes, equivalent to seven seven-bit characters, leaving 153 usable characters in every part. This is why the tool switches from '1 part' to a count based on 153 rather than 160 once you pass the threshold. There is a second trap: if your text contains a character outside the GSM alphabet — a curly quote, an em dash, an emoji, any Cyrillic or CJK letter — the whole message is re-encoded as UTF-16, and the limits collapse to 70 characters for a single message and 67 per part. Replacing one smart quote with a straight apostrophe can therefore cut a campaign's cost by more than half.
Characters, code points and what actually gets counted
This tool counts Unicode code points rather than UTF-16 code units, which is the more intuitive of the two. A plain letter, an accented letter such as e-acute and a simple emoji each count as one. Some sequences that look like a single glyph are genuinely several code points: a flag is two regional indicator symbols, an emoji with a skin tone is a base emoji plus a modifier, and a family emoji can be five or more code points joined by zero-width joiners. Those count as more than one here, and social platforms differ on how they count them too. Text pasted from Word may also contain decomposed accents, where the letter and its accent are stored separately and count as two. If a count looks a character or two higher than expected, a decomposed accent or an invisible zero-width character is usually the reason.
Tips
- Put the important words in the first 55 characters of a meta title so nothing critical is truncated.
- Swap curly quotes and em dashes for straight quotes and hyphens in SMS copy to stay on the 160-character GSM limit.
- Characters without spaces is the figure most translation agencies quote on, so use that when estimating a job.