Paste or type and see the count live: characters with and without spaces, words, lines, and how far you are from the usual platform limits. Nothing is uploaded.
Counting happens in your browser only — nothing is sent anywhere.
Characters is the raw length, which is what a field limit usually measures. Characters without spaces is the same count minus whitespace, useful when you are checking how much a line actually carries. Words is the count split on spaces and punctuation. Lines is the number of line breaks plus one.
This is the trap almost everyone hits. A plain letter is one character, but an emoji is one or more Unicode code points, and many platforms count each code point — so 🏳️🌈 can be six. A bio with twenty emoji can be sixty characters long by a platform's reckoning. If a limit rejects your text, count the emoji first; cutting one rarely hurts a caption, while cutting words usually does.
| Platform | Limit | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| X (Twitter) post | 280 characters | Most emoji count as two |
| Instagram caption | 2,200 characters | Only the first 125 show before "more" |
| Instagram bio | 150 characters | Emoji count as more than one here too |
| TikTok caption | 2,200 characters | Same first-125 truncation |
| YouTube title | 100 characters | Around 60 show in search results |
| Meta description (SEO) | about 155 characters | Longer descriptions get cut in Google |
| Discord message | 2,000 characters | Display names are limited separately |
| SMS | 160 characters | An emoji forces a shorter, multi-part message |
Because the limits are invisible until you hit them. A caption that is rejected after twenty minutes of writing is the worst way to discover that a platform counts differently to your text editor. Paste it here first, look at the number, and adjust before you lose the work.
Character counts and word counts answer different questions, and mixing them up is the most common way to misjudge a limit. Social platforms almost always limit characters, not words: an Instagram bio is 150 characters, which is roughly twenty-five words. SEO fields also work in characters — a good meta description is around 155, and a page title around 60, because Google truncates with an ellipsis beyond that.
Word counts matter for a different reason: they are the crude proxy search engines and editors use for depth. A product description of 400 words and one of 60 are judged differently, and rightly so. If you are writing a listing, a description or a bio that has to do some work, aim for the character limit first and then see whether you have enough words to say anything.
Average adult reading speed is roughly 200 to 250 words per minute for ordinary prose. The counter above divides your word count by 200 to give a rough read time, which is useful for scripts, video voiceovers and anything you are about to say in public. It is an estimate rather than a measurement — technical text reads more slowly and dialogue reads faster — but it is accurate enough to tell you whether a script is thirty seconds or three minutes.
A standard SMS is 160 characters of the Latin alphabet. The moment you include a single character outside that set — one emoji, one styled letter, one accented character — the whole message is switched to a different encoding and the limit drops to 70 characters per part, so a short text can silently split into three and be billed as three. The counter shows the estimated number of parts for exactly this reason.