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Character Counter & Platform Limit Checker

Count characters with and without spaces, words, sentences and lines as you type, then check your text against common limits for social posts, YouTube and search snippets. Everything runs in your browser.

Characters (with spaces)
0
Characters (no spaces)
0
Words
0
Sentences
0
Lines
0

Choose a preset to check your text against a platform limit.

Characters are counted as Unicode characters, so an emoji usually counts as one and some combined emojis count as several. Lines counts lines that contain text. Your text stays in your browser: it is not uploaded, saved or tracked.

What this character counter measures

  • Characters (with spaces): every character you type, including spaces, tabs and line breaks. Each Unicode character counts once, so an accented letter counts as one, while some emojis built from several characters count as more than one.
  • Characters (no spaces): the same count with spaces, tabs and line breaks removed.
  • Words: groups of characters separated by spaces or line breaks that contain a letter or number. A lone dash or emoji is not counted as a word.
  • Sentences: text ending in a full stop, question mark, exclamation mark or ellipsis. Abbreviations such as "e.g." can occasionally be counted as sentence endings.
  • Lines: lines that contain text. Empty lines are not counted.

Check character limits for common platforms

Choose a preset to compare your text with a platform's limit. The tool shows your count against the maximum, how many characters remain, or how many you are over.

  • X post: 280 characters, counted with weights. X counts each emoji and each Chinese, Japanese or Korean character as two, and every link as 23, and the X preset applies these rules. Source: X developer documentation.
  • Threads post: 500 characters. Threads also lets you attach up to 10,000 characters of text to a post. Source: Meta newsroom.
  • LinkedIn post: 3,000 characters. Source: LinkedIn Help.
  • Instagram caption: 2,200 characters, 30 hashtags and 20 @ tags, as listed for captions published through Instagram's API. The preset also counts hashtags and @ tags. Source: Meta for Developers.
  • YouTube title and description: 100 characters for titles and 5,000 for descriptions. Source: YouTube Help.
  • SEO title and meta description: Google does not use a fixed character limit for either. It shortens title links and snippets as needed to fit the device width. The presets use about 60 and about 160 characters as a common rule of thumb for an approximate preview range, not as a Google rule. Sources: Google Search Central on title links and snippets.

Limits were checked against these official sources on October 5, 2026. Platforms change their rules and may count some characters differently, so the platform's own editor is the final word. For more detail, read our guide to character limits for social posts, YouTube and search.

Character count vs word count

Character counts matter when a platform or form field caps how much text you can enter. Posts, captions, video titles, descriptions and many form fields are limited in characters, so a short word count can still be too long if the words are long or you use links and emojis.

Word counts matter when length is set in words, such as essays, assignments, articles and speeches. For those, use our word counter, which also estimates reading and speaking time, or the reading time calculator.

Why platform character limits matter

A hard limit is the most text a field will accept. Staying within it means your post, caption, title or description goes out as you wrote it, instead of being blocked or needing a last-minute rewrite in the platform's editor.

Being within a limit does not mean all of your text will be visible straight away. Feeds and search results often show only the start of longer text, so put the most important words first. Fitting a limit does not guarantee more views, engagement or better search rankings; it simply means the text fits.

Privacy

  • Your text is processed locally in your browser by a script on this page.
  • It is not uploaded to WriterFlowLab or sent to any other service, and it is not saved in cookies or browser storage. Close or refresh the page and it is gone.
  • No account, sign-up or email address is needed.

Like the rest of the site, this page uses Google Analytics and Google AdSense, as described in our privacy policy. They do not receive the text you enter.

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