What does Character Counter do?
Analyze text length and structure quickly.
Count characters, words, sentences, and lines instantly. Compare against platform limits.
Your text
Platform character limits
- Twitter / X0 / 280
- Instagram caption0 / 2,200
- TikTok caption0 / 2,200
- LinkedIn post0 / 3,000
- Meta description0 / 160
- YouTube title0 / 100
- Facebook post0 / 63,206
0
Characters
with spaces
0
Characters
without spaces
0
Words
0
Sentences
0
Lines
0
Paragraphs
~0 min
Reading time
at 200 wpm
Character Counting: Key Concepts
- Character count vs. word count
- Character count includes every character — letters, spaces, punctuation, and emoji. Word count splits on whitespace and counts discrete tokens. Social media platforms like Twitter enforce character limits; word processors often enforce word counts.
- Emoji and multi-byte characters
- Most emoji are represented as two or more Unicode code units (surrogate pairs in UTF-16). On Twitter/X, most emoji count as 2 characters. In JavaScript,
string.lengthcounts UTF-16 code units, not visible characters. - Meta description length
- Google typically displays 155–160 characters of a meta description. Descriptions shorter than 120 characters may be automatically expanded; longer ones are truncated with an ellipsis (…).
Frequently Asked Questions
Does the character counter count spaces?
The tool shows both counts side by side: 'Characters (with spaces)' includes every space, tab, and line break. 'Characters (without spaces)' strips all whitespace first. Most social media character limits — Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn — count spaces as characters, so use the 'with spaces' number when comparing against platform limits.
Why does Twitter count some characters as 2?
Twitter uses a weighted character counting system. Standard ASCII characters count as 1. Most emoji, kanji, and characters in Unicode Supplementary Multilingual Plane count as 2 because they are stored as UTF-16 surrogate pairs. URLs are always shortened to 23 characters regardless of length. The character counter on this page reports JavaScript's string.length, which mirrors Twitter's UTF-16 counting for most characters.
What counts as a word in the word counter?
The tool splits on whitespace (spaces, tabs, newlines) and counts non-empty tokens. 'Hello, world!' is 2 words. Hyphenated words like 'well-known' count as 1. Numbers like '3.14' count as 1 word. This matches how most word processors count words. Different platforms count slightly differently — academic submission portals may count hyphenated words as 2.
How is reading time estimated?
The estimate uses 200 words per minute (wpm), which is the low end of average adult silent reading speed. Most studies put average reading speed between 200–300 wpm. Using 200 gives a conservative estimate — your actual readers may finish slightly faster. For blog posts and articles, the commonly cited average is 238 wpm.
What is the meta description character limit for Google?
Google typically displays 155–160 characters of a meta description in search results. The platform limit shown here is 160 characters. Descriptions shorter than 120 characters are sometimes auto-expanded by Google using page content. Aim for 140–155 characters to stay within the displayed length on both desktop and mobile search results.
Need to count words in detail? Word Counter · Compare text with Text Compare