Does the character count include spaces?

Both counts are shown: total characters (including spaces) and characters excluding spaces.

How are sentences counted?

Sentences are counted by the number of period, exclamation, or question mark characters followed by a space or end of text.

What is the difference between lines and paragraphs?

Lines are delimited by newline characters. Paragraphs are groups of lines separated by one or more blank lines.

Character Counter — count characters, words, and lines

Type or paste your text below to count characters, words, sentences, paragraphs, and lines.

Count characters, words, sentences, and more

A character counter is an essential tool for anyone who writes within constraints — social media posts with character limits, meta descriptions, SMS messages, bios, or any other form with a maximum length. This tool counts characters with and without spaces, words, sentences, paragraphs, and lines as you type, updating instantly with each keystroke.

Why character limits exist

Different platforms enforce different character limits for good reasons:

Twitter/X: 280 characters per post. Originally 140 characters (one SMS message), doubled in 2017. The limit encourages concise communication and keeps the timeline browsable.

Instagram captions: Up to 2,200 characters, but only the first 125 show before the "more" truncation. Most engagement comes from short captions.

Meta descriptions (SEO): Google typically displays 155–160 characters. Write descriptions of this length to avoid truncation in search results.

SMS messages: A standard SMS is 160 characters in GSM encoding. Longer messages are split into multiple parts and reassembled by the receiving device.

LinkedIn headlines: 220 characters. LinkedIn bios: 2,600 characters.

Email subject lines: Best practice is under 60 characters to avoid truncation on mobile email clients.

Counting methodology

Characters with spaces: Every character including space, newline, and tab counts.

Characters without spaces: All whitespace characters are removed before counting. This is useful when comparing against limits that count visible characters only.

Words: The text is split by whitespace. Consecutive spaces count as one separator. Empty text has 0 words.

Sentences: Counted by terminal punctuation (period, exclamation mark, or question mark) followed by whitespace or end of text.

Paragraphs: Blocks of text separated by one or more blank lines.

Lines: Total newline characters plus one (the last line may not end with a newline).

Writing efficiently within limits

When you have a character limit, every word and punctuation mark matters. Useful compression techniques include:

Using active voice (shorter than passive)
Replacing "in order to" with "to"
Cutting redundant adjectives
Using numerals instead of spelled-out numbers
Abbreviating where context makes it clear

Character limits by platform

Understanding the specific character limits of different platforms helps you write more effectively:

Twitter/X: 280 characters per tweet. Before November 2017, the limit was 140 characters (matching one SMS). URLs are automatically shortened and count as 23 characters regardless of actual length. Images, videos, and polls do not count against the character limit.

LinkedIn: Headlines: 220 characters. About section: 2,600 characters. Posts: 3,000 characters. Comments: 1,250 characters.

Instagram: Captions: 2,200 characters (only first ~125 visible without expanding). Bio: 150 characters. Username: 30 characters.

Facebook: Posts: 63,206 characters. Comments: 8,000 characters. Page descriptions: 255 characters.

Google Business Profile: Business description: 750 characters. Posts: 1,500 characters.

YouTube: Video titles: 100 characters (70 recommended to avoid truncation). Descriptions: 5,000 characters (first 157 visible in search results).

SMS: 160 characters in GSM-7 encoding. Using characters outside GSM-7 (including many emojis and special characters) reduces the limit to 70 characters per segment.

Email subject lines: No technical limit, but 60 characters or fewer recommended to avoid truncation on mobile. Gmail truncates subjects at approximately 70 characters.

Typography terminology

Character: Any single unit in a written system — a letter, digit, space, punctuation mark, or special symbol. In Unicode, each character has a unique code point.

Glyph: The visual representation of a character in a specific font. A single character may have multiple glyphs (e.g., regular, bold, italic).

Token: In natural language processing, a token is typically a word or sub-word unit used by language models. GPT-4 uses approximately 750 words = 1,000 tokens as a rough conversion, which is why a character counter is a useful proxy for estimating token usage before pasting text into an AI tool with a context limit.

Characters across writing systems

Counting logic differs by script. In Latin-based scripts (English, Spanish, French, Portuguese), a character is roughly one letter, digit, or punctuation mark, and word boundaries are marked by spaces. In Chinese and Japanese, each ideograph is typically counted as one character rather than grouped into space-separated words, so a "280 character" limit on a CJK-language tweet holds far more information than an English one — this is part of why CJK-language posts on Twitter/X historically got a more generous effective limit. Arabic and Hebrew are written right-to-left but character counting works the same way as left-to-right scripts once you account for directionality. This tool counts Unicode code points consistently across all these cases.

Private and instant

The counter runs in your browser using JavaScript string methods and regular expressions applied to the text as you type. No text you enter is transmitted to a server, stored, or logged anywhere — refresh the page and it is gone.