Character Counter
Count characters in real time, with and without spaces. Useful any time you are writing against a hard limit — a meta description, a tweet, an SMS, a bio field, or a database column.
Character limits worth memorising
- Meta description — about 155 characters before Google truncates it in results.
- Title tag — about 60 characters, though Google measures pixel width rather than a strict count.
- X / Twitter post — 280 characters on a standard account.
- SMS — 160 characters for a single GSM-encoded message; adding one emoji switches the message to UCS-2 and drops the limit to 70.
- Instagram caption — 2,200 characters, with only the first ~125 shown before "more".
- Google Ads — 30 characters per headline, 90 per description.
With spaces or without?
Most platform limits — social posts, SMS, meta tags, form fields — count every character including spaces, punctuation, and line breaks. The "without spaces" figure is mainly used in translation and transcription work, where pricing is often quoted per 1,000 characters excluding spaces. When in doubt, use the with-spaces number, since that is the stricter of the two.
Emoji and accented characters
This tool counts JavaScript string units, which matches what most web forms enforce. Be aware that a single emoji frequently counts as two, and emoji with skin-tone or family modifiers can count as four or more, because they are built from multiple code points joined together. Accented Latin letters like é normally count as one. If a form rejects your text despite an apparently valid count, an emoji is the usual culprit.