How to use this tool
- Paste your text into the box above.
- Read the total and no-spaces counts in the stat cards.
- Check the progress bars against Twitter/X, SMS, Instagram bio, and meta description limits to see how close you are to each cutoff.
Where character limits actually show up
Word counts matter for essays and articles. Character counts matter almost everywhere else:
- Social posts: Twitter/X caps free posts at 280 characters. Instagram bios cap at 150. LinkedIn headlines run up to 220.
- SMS messages: A standard text holds 160 characters using GSM-7 encoding. Add a single emoji or a curly quote mark, and the message switches to Unicode encoding, which drops the limit to 70 characters and can silently split your message into two billed segments.
- SEO fields: Google truncates meta descriptions around 155–160 characters and title tags around 60.
- Push notifications and UI labels: Often capped tighter than any of the above, sometimes to 40 characters or less depending on the platform.
Why character count and word count tell different stories
A word count of 10 can hide wildly different character counts depending on word length. "The cat sat" and "Extraordinarily unprecedented circumstances" are both very short by word count and very different by character count. If a platform enforces a character cap, checking word count alone will mislead you every time.
The SMS encoding trap
This one catches people who don't expect it. A text message written entirely in standard characters holds 160 characters per segment. The moment you include an emoji, a smart/curly quote, an em dash, or most accented characters, the entire message switches to Unicode encoding, and the limit per segment drops to 70. A message that looks like a single short text can silently become two billed segments if it contains one emoji your keyboard added automatically.