What is the difference between characters with spaces and without spaces?

"Characters (with spaces)" counts every character in your text, including spaces, tabs, and line breaks. "Characters (without spaces)" strips all whitespace before counting, giving you only the visible letter and punctuation count.

How does the Twitter/X character counter work?

The X bar counts your text the way X does for accounts without Premium and compares it with 280. Every link counts as 23, each emoji as 2, and each Chinese, Japanese or Korean character as 2. Most other characters count as 1. X changes its rules now and then, so check the composer when you are within a few characters of the limit.

Why is the SMS limit 160 characters?

One SMS carries 140 bytes, which fits 160 characters in the GSM-7 alphabet. A single emoji or any character outside GSM-7, such as the Vietnamese ạ, switches the whole message to UCS-2, which fits only 70. Longer messages are split into parts of 153 characters (GSM-7) or 67 (UCS-2), and symbols such as € [ ] { } take 2 places in GSM-7. The SMS bar detects the encoding, names the character that forced UCS-2 and shows how many parts the message needs.

What reading speed does the tool use?

Reading time is estimated at 240 words per minute, a commonly cited average adult silent reading speed.

Is my text sent to a server?

No. All counting and analysis happens entirely in your browser. Nothing is ever sent to any server.

Why does an emoji count as 1 here but 2 or more elsewhere?

This counter counts the characters you see (grapheme clusters), so 😀, a thumbs-up with a skin tone (👍🏽) and a family emoji built from 3 people each count as 1, and so does é typed as e plus a combining accent. Code that uses JavaScript string length counts UTF-16 units instead: 2 for 😀, 4 for 👍🏽 and 8 for the family. The line under the counts shows code points, UTF-16 units and UTF-8 bytes, which matter for database and API limits.

What are the character limits on Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube and TikTok?

The tool has bars only for X, SMS, SEO title, meta description and Facebook, so compare the count with spaces against these: an Instagram caption allows 2,200 characters, a LinkedIn post 3,000, a YouTube title 100 and a description 5,000, a TikTok caption 4,000 in the app, a Threads post 500 and a Bluesky post 300. Platforms change limits now and then, so check the app if you are close.

How long should a title tag and meta description be?

The bars use 60 characters for a title and 160 for a meta description as rules of thumb. Google cuts titles by width, about 600 pixels on desktop, so wide letters run out sooner. It sets no fixed length for descriptions and trims snippets to fit the screen, which is shorter on phones. Put the main words first so a cut does not hide them.

Character Counter

Instantly count characters, words, sentences, and paragraphs — with live limit bars for Twitter/X, SMS, title tags, meta descriptions, and Facebook posts.

Paste or type your text and the counts update as you type: characters with and without spaces, words, sentences, paragraphs and reading time at 240 words per minute.

Your Text

Paste or type text on the left to see your character count.

Text Statistics

Characters
(with spaces)

Characters
(no spaces)

Words

Sentences

Paragraphs

Reading time
(240 wpm)

Platform Limits

Twitter / X 0 / 280

SMS Message 0 / 160

SEO Title Tag 0 / 60

Meta Description 0 / 160

Facebook Post 0 / 63,206

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Quick answer

Paste or type your text and the counts update as you type: characters with and without spaces, words, sentences, paragraphs and reading time at 240 words per minute. Characters are counted the way you see them, so an emoji with a skin tone or an e with an accent mark counts as 1. "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog." has 44 characters with spaces, 36 without and 9 words. Limit bars check X (280, counted the way X does), SMS (160, or 70 once there is an emoji or another non-GSM character), an SEO title (60), a meta description (160) and a Facebook post (63,206).

Examples

Text	Characters	UTF-16 units
Hello world	11	11
The fox sentence above	44	44
Line 1, Enter, Line 2	13	13
😀	1	2
👍🏽 (skin tone)	1	4
e + accent mark	1	2
Family emoji, 3 people	1	8

Paste or type your text.

Summary

Instantly count characters, words, sentences, and paragraphs — with live limit bars for Twitter/X, SMS, title tags, meta descriptions, and Facebook posts.

How it works

Paste or type your text into the input field on the left.
Character count, word count, sentence count, paragraph count, and reading time update live as you type.
Review the limit progress bars on the right to see how close you are to Twitter/X, SMS, title tag, meta description, and Facebook post limits.
Click "Sample Text" to load an example passage and explore all statistics.
Click "Clear" to reset the textarea and start fresh.

Use cases

Check tweet length before posting to stay within the 280-character Twitter/X limit.
Check whether an SMS fits in one part: 160 characters in GSM-7, or 70 once it has an emoji or another non-GSM character.
Optimize page title tags (under 60 characters) and meta descriptions (under 160 characters) for SEO.
Count characters and words in essays, emails, or social media captions with precision.

Frequently Asked Questions

Last updated: 2026-05-29 · Reviewed by Nham Vu