Character Counter
Characters with and without spaces, plus live limit gauges for the platforms that care.
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Save these drafts to a free account — access them from any device. →Characters with and without spaces, plus live limit gauges for the platforms that care.
Platform limits
SMS is a transport estimate — carriers and national character tables can vary.
Goal reached!
Words to characters: quick reference
| 100 words | ≈ 600 characters | ≈ 500 without spaces |
| 250 words | ≈ 1,500 characters | ≈ 1,250 without spaces |
| 500 words | ≈ 3,000 characters | ≈ 2,500 without spaces |
| 1,000 words | ≈ 6,000 characters | ≈ 5,000 without spaces |
| 1,500 words | ≈ 9,000 characters | ≈ 7,500 without spaces |
| 2,000 words | ≈ 12,000 characters | ≈ 10,000 without spaces |
Edge cases, counted live
How characters are counted
Every visible character, punctuation mark, space, tab and line break counts as one. Accented letters count once (café = 4 characters, because é is stored as a single composed letter here). «Without spaces» removes spaces, tabs and line breaks — nothing else.
The chips below are counted live by the same code as the counter above — paste your own edge case to check anything.
Honest limits — emoji and platforms
A simple emoji like 😀 counts as 1 character. Multi-person emoji are different: 👨👩👧 (family) is built from several code points joined invisibly, and this counter reports 5 — for what looks like one symbol. Platforms disagree too: X counts most emoji as 2, an SMS with any emoji switches the whole message to 70-character segments, and databases usually count storage bytes, not symbols. So «character count» legitimately differs between tools — the number here is code points, and the Twitter counter applies X's own weighting.
Who counts characters — and why
Meta titles and descriptions (≈60 and ≈155 characters before Google truncates); ad copy with hard platform caps; SMS segmentation (160 GSM-7, or 70 per segment once any emoji appears); form fields and database limits; app-store listings; exam and application answers with strict caps («max 4,000 characters» — usually WITH spaces, but check the rubric). For word-based targets, the word counter is the right tool; for per-platform meters, use the platform selector above.
Do spaces count as characters?
Both numbers are shown: characters including spaces (what most platform limits use) and characters excluding spaces (common for translation and typesetting quotes).
How are emoji counted?
As one character each, the way a person would count them. Some platforms count certain emoji as two — if you're right at a limit, leave a little margin.
What's the character limit for the big platforms?
X (Twitter) 280 for posts. Instagram 2,200 for captions. SMS 160 per message. Meta descriptions truncate around 160. LinkedIn posts allow 3,000. The gauges above track the ones most people write toward, live as you type.
How many characters is this text?
Paste your text in the editor above — the character count (with and without spaces) updates live as you type, along with words, sentences and reading time. Nothing is uploaded: counting happens in your browser, so it's instant even for very long documents.
How many characters are in 500 words?
English text averages about 5 characters per word plus a space, so 500 words is roughly 3,000 characters including spaces (about 2,500 without). The ratio shifts with style: technical writing runs longer words, chat messages shorter ones. For an exact figure, paste the text above — estimates are fine for planning, but platform limits are enforced on the real count.
How many characters fit in one SMS?
It depends on the characters you use. Plain GSM-7 text fits 160 characters in one message (153 each when a long text is split), and some symbols like ^ or € count double. One character outside that set — Arabic, Chinese, most emoji — switches the whole message to Unicode encoding, where a single SMS holds only 70 UTF-16 code units (67 each when split). The SMS option here calculates this live. Carriers and national character tables can still vary, so treat it as a close estimate.