WordBench tool
Character Counter
Count characters, with and without spaces, as you type.
This character counter reports characters with and without spaces as you type, and at the same time measures your text against the limits people are usually counting against: 280 weighted units on X, 150 characters in an Instagram bio, 3,000 on LinkedIn, 100 in a YouTube title, and 160 characters in a single GSM-7 SMS or only 70 once an emoji forces UCS-2 encoding. It also shows graphemes, code points and UTF-8 bytes side by side, which is the reason two character counters can disagree about the same sentence.
Against platform limits
Each bar counts in the unit that platform actually uses, so the numbers differ from the plain character count on purpose.
As an SMS this is 0 segments in GSM-7 (0 septets, 160 left before the next one).
The same text, measured four ways
For plain English these four numbers are identical except the bytes. Add an emoji and they separate: a thumbs-up with a skin tone is one grapheme, two code points, four UTF-16 units and eight UTF-8 bytes.
About the character counter
The WordBench character counter gives you a running count of every character in your text the moment you type or paste it. It shows characters with spaces and without, along with words, sentences, and lines, so you can size a piece of text against any limit at a glance.
Most people counting characters are counting against something specific: a bio field, an ad headline, a text message, a meta description, a database column. So the counter does that work too. Live bars show what your text costs on X, Instagram, Bluesky, LinkedIn, YouTube, Google Ads and SMS, each measured in the unit that platform actually uses rather than in one generic character count applied everywhere.
Everything runs in your browser. Nothing is uploaded, nothing is logged, and closing the tab clears it, which matters when the text is a cover letter, an unsent message or an unpublished draft.
Why do two character counters give different numbers?
Because there are four different things that can reasonably be called a character, and different tools count different ones. A grapheme cluster is what a person sees as one character. A code point is one Unicode value. A UTF-16 code unit is what JavaScript's String.length returns, which is what many counters report without saying so. A UTF-8 byte is storage size, which is what a database column limit usually means.
For ordinary English text all four agree, so the disagreement never shows up. Add one emoji and they split apart immediately. A thumbs-up with a medium skin tone is a single grapheme, but it is built from two code points, occupies four UTF-16 code units, and takes eight UTF-8 bytes. A four-person family emoji is still one grapheme, yet it is seven code points, eleven UTF-16 code units and twenty-five UTF-8 bytes.
Accents can split the same way. The letter e-acute can be stored as one precomposed code point or as a plain e followed by a combining accent. Both look identical on screen and both are one grapheme, but the second version is two code points and three UTF-8 bytes instead of one and two. This is why X normalizes text to Unicode Normalization Form C before counting anything, so the two spellings cost the same.
The counter above shows all four numbers together, so when a platform rejects text that your counter said was short enough, you can see which measure it was actually using.
Why is the SMS character limit 160, or 70 with an emoji?
An SMS carries a fixed payload of 1,120 bits. The original GSM 03.38 alphabet packs each character into 7 bits, and 1,120 divided by 7 is 160, which is where the famous limit comes from. That alphabet covers basic Latin letters, digits, common punctuation and a short list of European characters. Nine more characters, including the square brackets, curly braces, backslash, caret, tilde, pipe and euro sign, live in an extension table and cost two septets each.
The moment your message contains a single character outside that alphabet, such as an emoji, a curly apostrophe pasted in from a word processor, or any non-Latin script, the whole message switches to 16-bit UCS-2 encoding. At 16 bits per character the same 1,120-bit payload holds only 70 characters. One smart quote can therefore cut your limit by more than half.
Longer messages are not truncated, they are split into segments and reassembled on the handset. Each segment gives up seven bits of space to a User Data Header describing how to rejoin them, which drops the capacity to 153 characters per segment in GSM-7 and 67 in UCS-2. Carriers bill per segment, so a 161-character message costs twice what a 160-character one does. The counter above shows the encoding, the segment count, and which character forced the switch when one did.
How many characters should a meta title or description be?
Neither has a published limit, which is the honest answer that most character-count content skips. Google's own documentation states that there is no limit on how long a meta description can be, and that the snippet is simply truncated in search results as needed, typically to fit the device width. The same is true of the title link, which Google may also rewrite entirely.
Truncation happens on pixel width, not on character count, so a title made of wide capitals clips sooner than the same number of narrow lowercase letters. The commonly quoted figures of roughly 50 to 60 characters for a title and around 155 for a description are useful working targets derived from how much fits a typical desktop result, but they are conventions rather than rules. Front-load the important words and the exact count matters much less.
What are the character limits on X, Instagram, LinkedIn and SMS?
Every figure below was read off the platform’s own documentation and last checked on 23 July 2026. The unit column matters: these are not all the same kind of character.
| Platform | Field | Limit | Counted in | What people get wrong |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| X (Twitter) | Post, free account | 280 | weighted units | X weights the count: Latin letters, digits and common punctuation cost 1, while every emoji and every CJK character costs 2. A link always costs 23 no matter how long it is. |
| X (Twitter) | Longer post, Premium | 25,000 | characters | Anyone can read a longer post but only a Premium subscriber can write one. |
| Profile bio | 150 | characters | The tightest field most people write in regularly, and the one where line breaks quietly eat your budget. | |
| Caption | 2,200 | characters | Meta documents 2,200 for Instagram ad captions, together with a maximum of 30 hashtags per caption. Only the first two lines or so are shown before the More link. | |
| Threads | Post | 500 | characters | Since September 2025 you can also attach up to 10,000 further characters of text to a post, which is read inside Threads rather than as a screenshot. |
| Bluesky | Post | 300 | graphemes | The AT Protocol schema sets two ceilings on the same field: 300 graphemes and 3,000 UTF-8 bytes. A family emoji is one grapheme but 25 bytes, so heavy emoji use can hit the byte ceiling first. |
| Post | 3,000 | characters | The feed collapses a post after roughly the first three lines, so the opening matters far more than the ceiling. | |
| YouTube | Video title | 100 | characters | 100 is the hard field limit. Search and suggested-video thumbnails clip the visible title well before that. |
| YouTube | Video description | 5,000 | characters | Only the first few lines appear above the Show more fold, so links and context belong at the top. |
| SMS | Single message, GSM-7 | 160 | characters | GSM-7 packs each character into 7 bits, and an SMS payload is 1,120 bits, which is where 160 comes from. |
| SMS | Single message, UCS-2 | 70 | characters | One emoji, curly quote or accented letter outside GSM-7 switches the whole message to 16-bit UCS-2 and drops the limit from 160 to 70. |
| SMS | Per segment, GSM-7 | 153 | characters | Past 160 characters the message is split and each part gives up 7 characters to a User Data Header that tells the handset how to reassemble it. |
| SMS | Per segment, UCS-2 | 67 | characters | Same header overhead, in 16-bit encoding: 70 drops to 67 per part. Each part is billed separately. |
| Google Ads | Responsive search ad headline | 30 | characters | Every character in a double-width language such as Japanese, Korean or Chinese counts as two. |
| Google Ads | Responsive search ad description | 90 | characters | Display paths alongside it are capped at 15 characters each. |
Which character limits are not real limits?
Two of the most searched limits are conventions, not published maximums. Treating them as hard numbers is the most common mistake in advice about character counts.
| Surface | Commonly quoted | What the documentation actually says |
|---|---|---|
| Meta description | Around 155 to 160 characters | Google publishes no limit at all. Its documentation says there is no limit on how long a meta description can be, and that the snippet is truncated in search results as needed, typically to fit the device width. The 155 figure is a rule of thumb derived from how much fits on a desktop result, not a rule. |
| Title tag | Around 50 to 60 characters | Google also publishes no character limit for the title link, and it may rewrite your title entirely. Truncation happens on available width, so a title of wide capitals clips sooner than the same character count in narrow lowercase. |
How the same text measures in four different units
Every row is a single user-perceived character. The columns are the four ways a tool might count it.
| Text | Graphemes | Code points | UTF-16 units | UTF-8 bytes |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| a | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 |
| é (precomposed, U+00E9) | 1 | 1 | 1 | 2 |
| é (e plus combining accent) | 1 | 2 | 2 | 3 |
| € (U+20AC) | 1 | 1 | 1 | 3 |
| 漢 (U+6F22) | 1 | 1 | 1 | 3 |
| 👍 (U+1F44D) | 1 | 1 | 2 | 4 |
| 👍🏽 (thumbs-up plus skin tone) | 1 | 2 | 4 | 8 |
| 👨👩👧👦 (family, joined by ZWJ) | 1 | 7 | 11 | 25 |
Counts follow the Unicode encoding rules: UTF-8 uses one to four bytes per code point, and any code point above U+FFFF takes two UTF-16 code units as a surrogate pair.
Who uses it
Worked example
Paste the sentence "Acme Robotics ships this spring."
The counter reports 31 characters with spaces and 27 without, along with 5 words and 1 sentence. Add an emoji at the end and the character count rises by exactly one, because the tool counts whole characters the way most platforms do.
Frequently asked questions
Does it count spaces as characters? It shows both numbers side by side. One count includes spaces and one excludes them, because some limits count every character while others ignore whitespace.
Does it count spaces as characters?
It shows both numbers side by side. One count includes spaces and one excludes them, because some limits count every character while others ignore whitespace.
How are emoji and accented letters counted?
The main count treats one emoji or one accented letter as one character. The four-way panel underneath then shows the same text as graphemes, code points, UTF-16 code units and UTF-8 bytes, because a platform limit might be measured in any of those. A thumbs-up with a skin tone is one grapheme, two code points, four UTF-16 units and eight UTF-8 bytes.
What is the character limit on X (Twitter)?
280 for a free account, but X counts in weighted units rather than plain characters. Latin letters, digits and common punctuation cost 1, while every emoji and every CJK character costs 2, and a link always costs 23 whatever its real length. X Premium subscribers can write longer posts of up to 25,000 characters.
Why does one emoji cut my SMS limit from 160 to 70?
A single SMS carries 1,120 bits. The 7-bit GSM-7 alphabet fits 160 characters into that, but any character outside the alphabet, including every emoji, switches the whole message to 16-bit UCS-2 encoding, which fits only 70. Past those limits the message is split into segments of 153 or 67 characters and billed per segment.
Is there an official character limit for a meta description?
No. Google's documentation says there is no limit on how long a meta description can be and that the snippet is truncated as needed to fit the device width. The widely quoted 155 to 160 characters is a convention based on how much usually fits a desktop result, not a published maximum.
What is the difference between a character and a word count?
A character count tallies individual letters, digits, spaces, and symbols, while a word count tallies runs of non-whitespace. Character limits are common in short fields, while word counts matter more for essays and articles.
Is my text stored anywhere?
No. The counting runs entirely in your browser. Nothing is uploaded or saved, and refreshing the page clears the text. That includes the platform limit meters, which are calculated locally with JavaScript.