Character Counter

Type or paste text in the box above and every number updates as you type. Along the top you see characters, characters without spaces, words, sentences, paragraphs and lines. The panel on the right adds the X (Twitter) length, the number of SMS messages, bytes, emoji, unique words, reading time and more. There is no button to press and no page reload.

Pick a platform under Check against a limit and a bar shows how much room is left, turning amber near the end and red when you go over. If you go over a character limit, the part that does not fit is shown in red and a Cut to button trims the text for you. Below the box, Most used words lists the words you repeat most, with their share of all words.

This character counter online works in your browser. Your text is not uploaded anywhere. If you tick Keep my text in this browser, the draft is saved only on this device, so it is still there when you come back.

A character is what a reader sees as one symbol: a letter, a digit, a space, a punctuation mark or an emoji. That sounds simple, but computers store text in smaller pieces. An accented letter can be one code point or two (a plain e plus a separate accent mark), and a single emoji such as a family or a flag can be made of four to eight pieces joined together.

This page counts what you see. It uses the browser's built-in text rules (Intl.Segmenter) to split text into graphemes, the technical name for user-perceived characters. So a thumbs-up with a skin tone is 1 character, a flag is 1 character, and é is 1 character however it was typed. If your browser is too old to have those rules, the page falls back to counting code points, which is close for most text.

Other programs sometimes count the hidden pieces instead, so they may show 2 for one emoji, or more. Neither is wrong; they measure different things. That is why the panel on the right also shows UTF-16 code units and UTF-8 bytes, the two other counts you are most likely to meet. The table below shows how the same text can give different numbers.

Most limits you meet online are a character counter including spaces: every space, tab and line break is one character, just like a letter. The first box, Characters, shows exactly that. The second box, Without spaces, takes away every space, tab and line break and counts the rest, which some teachers, translators and print layouts ask for.

Line breaks are easy to forget. When you press Enter, you add one character. A blank line between two paragraphs is two characters. If a form says you are 3 characters over and you cannot see why, look for blank lines at the end or a space after the last full stop.

Spaces also matter for bytes. A normal space is one byte, but a non-breaking space copied from a web page or a word processor is two bytes in UTF-8. It still counts as one character here, and as a space in the Spaces and line breaks row.

All of these numbers come at once, with no account and no limit on how much text you paste. A long report or a whole chapter is fine; the counts update a moment after each change. There is no premium version hiding the SMS panel or the most used words list.

Because the work happens on your device, the speed depends on your computer or phone, not on a server queue. Very long texts of hundreds of thousands of words still work, though the counts may lag slightly while you type on an older phone.

X does not count every character as 1, so a plain count can mislead you. A character counter for twitter needs X's weighted rules, and the X (Twitter) length row and the X (Twitter) post limit follow them. The standard limit is 280.

Under those rules, most letters in Latin, Greek, Cyrillic, Arabic, Hebrew, Hindi and many other scripts count as 1, and so do common punctuation such as dashes and curly quotes. Chinese, Japanese and Korean characters count as 2, and so does most emoji, even a long joined emoji such as a family. Every link counts as 23, whether it is 12 or 120 characters long, because X shortens links.

So a post written fully in Japanese fits about 140 characters, not 280, and a post with two links has already used 46 of its 280. The hint under the bar reminds you of this whenever the X limit is selected.

Two honest notes. First, this page treats web addresses starting with http or https, and bare addresses ending in .com, .org, .net, .io, .co, .ai, .dev, .app, .me, .in, .uk or .de, as links. A bare address with another ending, such as .xyz, is counted as plain text here, while X may still turn it into a link. Second, X can change its rules and offers longer posts on paid plans. The counter in the X app is always the final word.

Instagram allows up to 2,200 characters in a caption and 150 in your bio, and both are in the list under Check against a limit. Choose Instagram caption or Instagram bio and the bar shows how many characters are left. A character counter for instagram is most useful for the bio, where every character is tight.

Captions are cut off in the feed after the first line or two, with a more link. Put the key message, a question or your call to action in the first sentence, and keep hashtags at the end. If you go over 2,200, the red highlight shows exactly which words would not fit, and Cut to 2,200 trims the caption at that point.

Emoji count as 1 character here, the way you see them. The Instagram app may count some joined emoji differently, so leave a small margin if your caption is right at the limit.

One draft often goes to several networks. Instead of guessing, use this page as a character counter for social media: paste the post once and switch the limit from one platform to the next. The counts stay the same; only the bar and the numbers left or over change.

These are the limits built in, exactly as the page uses them. The ones marked about are guides rather than hard limits, because search engines and phones cut text by width, not by a fixed number of characters.

LinkedIn shows only the start of a post before see more, so lead with the point. The 220-character headline is the line under your name everywhere on the site. TikTok captions can be long, but most viewers read only the first line over the video. Threads posts stop at 500. Facebook allows very long posts, but shorter ones are usually read more.

For YouTube, the 100-character title is often cut on phones well before the end, so put the topic first. The description can be 5,000 characters; the first two lines show above the fold.

Text messages have their own rules, and the SMS panel follows them. A character counter for sms has to know which alphabet your text needs, because that decides how much fits in one message.

If every character is in the basic GSM-7 alphabet (English letters, digits, common punctuation and a few accented letters such as é, è, ü and ñ), one message holds 160 characters. A few symbols, ^ { } [ ] ~ | \ and €, take two places each. As soon as one character is outside that alphabet, the whole message switches to Unicode, and only 70 characters fit.

Long messages are split into parts, and each part loses a few characters to the header that tells the phone how to join them. So split GSM-7 messages hold 153 characters per part, and split Unicode messages 67 per part. The panel shows the number of messages, the encoding, and how many characters are left in the current part.

The most common surprise is a single curly apostrophe, a long dash or an emoji copied from somewhere else. It quietly turns a 150-character GSM-7 message into three Unicode parts. When that happens, the panel names the characters that caused it, so you can replace them with plain ones. Emoji outside the basic range take two places in Unicode.

Search results and ads have tight space. SEO title (about 60) and Meta description (about 160) are guides: Google trims titles and descriptions by pixel width, so a title full of wide letters such as W and M is cut sooner than one with narrow letters. Aim a little under and put the important words first.

Google Ads limits are strict: 30 characters for each headline and 90 for each description. Choose the matching limit, write, and the bar tells you exactly how many characters are left. Push notifications are cut by the phone after roughly 110 characters, so keep the message short.

The bar under Check against a limit is green while there is plenty of room, amber above 90% and red once you go over. The line below it says how many characters, words or bytes are left or over, followed by used and maximum, for example 254 / 280.

Choose Your own limit… at the end of the list to type any number and pick its unit: characters, words or bytes. Bytes help with database fields and APIs that limit size in bytes, where an emoji can use 4. Words help with assignments and abstracts.

When text is over a character limit, a red box shows the last part that still fits followed by the part that does not, highlighted. Press Cut to and the text is trimmed at that point, without breaking an emoji or an accented letter in half. Cut to appears only for limits counted in plain characters; for the X post limit and for word or byte limits, trim the text yourself.

Application essays come with firm limits, and they are counted in different ways. The Common App personal statement allows 650 words, so that entry in the list counts words. The AMCAS personal statement for US medical schools allows 5,300 characters including spaces, so that entry counts characters. Abstract (250 words) is there for papers and conference abstracts.

For any other scheme, use this character counter for personal statement drafts with Your own limit…. UCAS in the UK, for example, has used a 4,000-character limit; type 4000 and choose characters. Rules change from year to year, so check the current numbers on the official site before you submit.

Application portals often count line breaks and spaces, and some count a paragraph break as more than one character. Paste your final text into the portal early, compare its count with this page, and leave a small margin. Keep my text in this browser is handy while you redraft over several days on the same computer, but keep a copy of your essay somewhere safe as well.

You do not need to copy text out of Word. Press Open TXT, DOCX or PDF, or drop the file on the box, and the text of a .docx file is read in your browser and counted. This makes the page a character counter for word document files from Microsoft Word, Google Docs (downloaded as .docx), LibreOffice or Pages exports.

Only the text is read; images and formatting are ignored, and headers, footers, comments or text boxes may not be included. The text replaces what is already in the box. The older .doc format is not supported; open it in your editor and save it as .docx, or simply copy and paste the text.

Word's own count may differ slightly. Word counts some emoji and symbols by their hidden pieces, may treat hyphenated words as one word, and includes or skips footnotes depending on a setting. If a teacher or publisher names a tool, use theirs for the final number.

A PDF can be opened the same way, and the text of every page is read in your browser and joined, with a blank line between pages. This is a quick character counter from pdf files such as reports, articles or old drafts, without converting anything first.

There is one limit to know: only PDFs that contain real text can be counted. A scanned PDF is just pictures of pages, so there is no text to read and the box stays empty or nearly empty. In that case, turn the pages into images with PDF to JPG and read the words with Image to Text, then paste the result here. A password-protected PDF may refuse to open; remove the password first with Unlock PDF if you are allowed to.

PDF text can also come out with extra line breaks or hyphens where lines were broken, which changes the line and paragraph counts slightly. If you need clean text to edit, PDF to Text or PDF to Word gives you a copy you can tidy up.

Most used words lists up to 20 words you use most, with how many times each appears and its share of all words, for example design 12 2.4%. This is the keyword density figure many writers check: if a word stands at 6% or more, the text may read as repetitive.

Skip common words (the, and, of…) is on by default. It leaves out short everyday words such as the, and, is and you, as well as plain numbers, so the list shows the words that carry meaning. Untick it to see every word, which is useful for spotting a habit such as starting many sentences with so or just.

Capital letters are ignored, so Design and design are counted together. Different forms of a word, such as design and designs, are counted separately.

Reading time is the word count divided by 238 words per minute, a common average for silent reading of everyday text. Speaking time uses 140 words per minute, a calm pace for a talk, a podcast or a video script. Both are shown in minutes and seconds.

Treat them as estimates. Technical text, a second language or slides with pauses take longer; a quick skim takes less. For a timed speech, read it aloud once with a timer and compare.

Writing to a tight limit is easier with a few habits. Write the full version first, then cut. Cutting a clear long draft is quicker than squeezing words in as you go, and the red highlight shows exactly how far over you are.

Remove filler before you remove meaning. Words such as really, very, just, actually and in order to can usually go without losing anything. Replace a phrase with one word where you can: at this point in time becomes now, due to the fact that becomes because.

Watch the invisible characters. Double spaces after full stops, a space at the end of a line and blank lines at the end of the text all count. Pasting from a word processor can also bring curly quotes and long dashes, which matter for SMS and, on some systems, for byte limits.

Put the most important words first. Feeds, search results, notifications and phone screens all cut text from the end, so the start is what most people read. If you have to choose, lose the last sentence, not the first.

Leave a small margin. Platforms sometimes count emoji, links or line breaks slightly differently from any outside tool, so staying a few characters under the limit avoids a last-minute surprise when you press post or submit.

Yes, it is a character counter free to use and private by design. Every count is made by code running in this page, in your browser. Your text is not uploaded, not logged and not put in the address bar. Files you open are read on your device too; DOCX and PDF text is extracted by libraries loaded from this site.

The page remembers your chosen limit, your own limit and unit, and whether Keep my text in this browser is ticked, in this browser's local storage. Your text is stored there only if you tick that box, and it is removed when you untick it. You can also clear it in your browser's site data settings.

Writing for readers rather than for a limit? The Word Counter focuses on words, readability and reading level. Case Converter fixes text typed in capitals or changes it to title case, and Diff Checker shows what changed between two drafts. Need dummy text to test a layout or a form limit? The Lorem Ipsum Generator makes as many words or paragraphs as you need.

Working from documents? PDF to Text pulls the text out of a PDF, PDF to Word turns it into an editable file, and Image to Text reads words from a photo or screenshot so you can count them here.