Text Count Checker

Getting Started with Our Character and Word Counter

"How many characters is this tweet?" "Is my meta description under 160?" "How long is this essay?" Paste any text into the box above and you'll instantly see the character count (with and without spaces), word count, sentence count, paragraph count, emoji count, and hashtag count — updated live as you type. Everything runs in your browser, so there's no upload, no signup, and no limit on how much text you can check.

How to Count Characters and Words in Your Text

1. Paste or type your text into the text area above. You can drop in a tweet, a college essay, a product description, a blog draft — anything.
2. Read the counters at the top of the page. Characters, words, sentences, paragraphs, emojis, and hashtags update on every keystroke.
3. Edit in place until your text fits the limit you need. The counters reflect your latest changes immediately.

Does Character Count Include Spaces?

Yes, by default — and for most platforms it needs to. Twitter/X, SMS, Instagram, and LinkedIn all count spaces toward their character limits, so the headline "Characters" number on this page includes them. If you're working to a brief that asks for characters without spaces (common in academic and print publishing), strip whitespace from your text first or subtract the word count minus one from the total.

The confusion usually comes from Microsoft Word, which shows both "Characters (no spaces)" and "Characters (with spaces)" in its word-count dialog. When a platform says "character limit" with no qualifier, assume spaces are counted.

Character Count vs Word Count — What's the Difference?

Character count measures every individual letter, digit, space, and punctuation mark. Word count measures how many space-separated words are in your text.

"Hello world!" → 12 characters, 2 words

Word count is the metric you'll usually see on essays, blog posts, and article briefs. Character count matters when you're writing to a hard limit — tweets, SMS, meta descriptions, UCAS personal statements, YouTube titles. Most platforms use one or the other, rarely both, so check which one your target asks for before you start trimming.

Character and Word Limits for Common Platforms

Social media, SEO, and messaging platforms all enforce different limits. The most common ones:

• Twitter / X post — 280 characters (1,000 for Premium)
• SMS / iMessage segment — 160 characters before it splits into a second message
• Instagram caption — 2,200 characters (only the first 125 show before "more")
• Facebook post — 63,206 characters, but engagement drops sharply past ~80
• LinkedIn post — 3,000 characters
• LinkedIn headline — 220 characters
• YouTube title — 100 characters (around 60 show in search)
• YouTube description — 5,000 characters
• Google meta description — 160 characters before truncation on desktop
• Google page title — around 60 characters
• UCAS personal statement — 4,000 characters or 47 lines, whichever comes first
• AMCAS personal comments — 5,300 characters

Paste your draft into the counter above and watch the number live while you edit.

Counting Emojis and Hashtags

Most platforms count each emoji as two characters (they're stored as surrogate pairs), so a caption that reads fine in plain text can blow past 280 characters once you add flags, skin tones, and sparkles. The emoji counter on this page gives you the emoji count; the character counter reflects how much room they take up in your total.

The hashtag counter is useful for Instagram in particular, which caps posts at 30 hashtags — go over and Instagram may quietly drop the whole caption. LinkedIn and TikTok have softer limits but reward focused hashtag use over spam.

Does It Work for Chinese, Japanese, Arabic, and Other Languages?

Yes. The counter uses the browser's native Unicode handling, so Chinese ideographs, Japanese kana, Korean hangul, Arabic script, Cyrillic, and other non-Latin text are counted accurately. One CJK character counts as one character — which matches how Twitter and most platforms count them too.

Word count for languages that don't use spaces between words (like Chinese and Japanese) is an approximation, because "word" isn't a clean unit in those writing systems. Character count is the reliable metric for CJK text.

Need to Compare Two Versions of a Text?

If you're editing a draft and want to see exactly what changed between versions — not just the totals — use our text diff comparison tool. It highlights every added, removed, and modified line side by side, which is handy for tracking revisions, catching unintended edits, or diffing translated content.