Character Counter for Text

What Character Counter does

Paste your text and the Counts panel shows five numbers: characters with spaces, characters without spaces, words, lines and SMS parts. Below it, the Against common limits table compares your total with a 280-character X post, a 60-character page title, a 160-character meta description, a 2,200-character Instagram caption and a 160-character text message, and shows how many characters remain or how far over you are. Spaces, punctuation and line breaks each count as one character. As a yardstick, the sentence "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog." is 44 characters with spaces, 36 without, and 9 words.

How long is 100, 500, 1,000 or 5,000 characters?

Word counts are estimates for ordinary English at 5 to 6 characters per word including the space. The SMS parts column is this tool's own figure for text of that length.

Word estimates vary with vocabulary: technical writing with long words gives fewer words per 1,000 characters, and chatty text gives more. Paste your real text for the exact figure.

Common character limits by platform

The first five rows are checked automatically in the tool's limits table. The others are listed for reference; compare them with the Characters figure yourself.

Platforms change their limits from time to time, and search engines cut titles and descriptions by pixel width rather than a fixed count, so treat 60 and 160 as guidelines.

Character count examples

Why emoji and accents give different counts in different tools

This tool counts Unicode code points. Programming languages and some apps count other units, which is why a char length in code may not match.

A flag is two regional indicator symbols, a skin-tone emoji is a base emoji plus a modifier, and a family emoji is several people joined by invisible zero-width joiners. If a count is one or two higher than expected, look for one of these or for an invisible character pasted from another app.

How the SMS parts figure is worked out, and its limit

A text message of up to 160 characters is one part. Past 160, the message is sent as linked parts and each part gives up 7 characters to the header that lets the phone reassemble them, leaving 153. The tool therefore shows 1 part up to 160 characters, 2 parts from 161 to 306, 3 parts from 307 to 459 and 4 parts from 460.

This assumes every character is in the GSM 7-bit alphabet, which covers unaccented English letters, digits and common punctuation. The tool does not check for that. If your message contains an emoji, a curly quote or apostrophe pasted from a word processor, or text in a script such as Cyrillic, Arabic or Chinese, carriers send it in a 16-bit encoding and the real limits drop to 70 characters for one part and 67 for each part after that. A few GSM characters, including the euro sign and square brackets, also use two character slots each. For billing-critical campaigns, replace curly punctuation with straight quotes and confirm the part count with your SMS provider.

What the five counts mean

• Characters (with spaces): every code point in the box, including spaces, tabs, line breaks and punctuation.
• Characters (without spaces): the same count with all whitespace removed, meaning spaces, tabs and line breaks.
• Words: runs of characters separated by whitespace. A hyphenated term such as well-known is one word, and a number counts as a word.
• Lines: the number of line breaks plus one, so a blank line between two paragraphs counts as a line.
• SMS parts: 1 for up to 160 characters, otherwise the total divided by 153 and rounded up.

Step by step

1. 1

   Paste or type into the Your text box. It opens with a short sample you can overwrite.

2. 2

   Read the Counts panel: Characters (with spaces), Characters (without spaces), Words, Lines and SMS parts.

3. 3

   Check the Against common limits table. The Remaining column shows characters left, or a figure such as 8 over.

4. 4

   Edit the text until the row you care about shows a number rather than an over amount.