Free Character Counter

Instantly count characters, words, sentences, paragraphs and lines. Real-time progress bars show you exactly where you stand against Twitter, Instagram, SMS and meta tag limits.

                
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Characters

Words

Lines

Paragraphs

Paste or type your text below

Characters

No Spaces

Words

Sentences

Paragraphs

Lines

Read (min)

Unique Words

Platform Limits

Top Keywords

Type something to see keyword frequency.

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What This Character Counter Does

Paste or type any text into the editor above and eight metrics update instantly with every keystroke: total characters including spaces and punctuation, characters without spaces, word count, sentence count, paragraph count, line count, estimated reading time, and unique word count. All analysis runs entirely in your browser using JavaScript — nothing is ever transmitted to a server — so you can freely paste confidential drafts, private messages or sensitive business copy without any privacy concern.

The platform limits panel tracks your character count simultaneously against six major thresholds: Twitter/X posts (280), SMS single segment (160), Google meta descriptions (160), Google page titles (60), Instagram captions (2,200) and LinkedIn posts (3,000). Each bar turns amber as you approach the limit and red if you exceed it, giving you a clear visual signal without having to calculate anything manually. The keyword pills below show the most frequent substantive words in your text — useful for a quick sanity check that your copy is topically focused before you publish.

Tips for Using the Character Counter Effectively

For Twitter/X, remember that URLs are always wrapped to 23 characters by the platform regardless of their actual length, so your raw character count here will read higher than what Twitter credits you.
SMS messages switch from GSM-7 encoding (160 chars/segment) to UCS-2 Unicode (70 chars/segment) the moment any non-standard character appears — curly quotes, accented letters or emoji all trigger this automatically.
Google's displayed title and description lengths depend on pixel width, not just character count. Wider letters like W and M get cut sooner than the 60/160 character guides suggest, so aim comfortably under the limit.
The "No Spaces" count is useful when a brief or academic journal specifies a character limit that explicitly excludes whitespace — a common requirement in print typesetting contexts.
Use the Download .txt button to save your trimmed or edited copy directly from the editor without needing to open a separate application.
If your pasted text has accumulated duplicate lines from repeated copying, run it through our Remove Duplicate Lines tool first to get a clean count.

Frequently Asked Questions

What does this character counter measure?

The tool tracks eight distinct metrics simultaneously, all updating in real time with each keystroke: total characters including spaces and punctuation, characters without spaces, word count, sentence count, paragraph count, line count, estimated reading time, and unique word count. The platform limits panel adds six more live indicators showing how your current character count compares to Twitter/X, SMS, meta description, meta title, Instagram and LinkedIn thresholds.

All analysis runs entirely inside your browser — no text is ever sent to a server. This means you can paste confidential contracts, medical notes, unpublished drafts or any private content without any risk of it being stored, logged or accessed by anyone else. If you also need reading time, speaking time, average word length and a full keyword density table, our companion Word Counter covers all of those in a single screen.

How is character count different from word count?

A character count tallies every individual symbol in your text — letters, digits, spaces, punctuation marks and special characters. A word count groups those characters into discrete tokens separated by whitespace. Academic essays, editorial briefs and most creative writing commissions are governed by word count, because a "500-word article" is a meaningful unit of content regardless of how many characters it contains.

Social media posts, ad copy, SMS messages, email subject lines and meta tags are governed by character count, because platforms truncate at a fixed symbol threshold regardless of how many words that threshold happens to contain. A 280-character tweet might hold 40 short words or 20 long ones — the platform doesn't care which. Having both metrics on one screen lets you optimise for whichever constraint your current project imposes without switching tools.

Why do character limits matter across publishing platforms?

Every major content platform truncates text that exceeds its character threshold, and the way it truncates varies — sometimes in ways that cut your message mid-sentence or hide your call to action entirely. Twitter/X enforces a hard 280-character limit and simply prevents you from posting if you go over. Standard SMS messages allow 160 characters per segment in GSM-7 encoding; exceed that and the message splits into two segments, which costs more and can arrive out of order depending on the carrier.

Instagram shows only the first 125 characters of a caption in the feed before truncating to a "more" tap, making the opening line critical for engagement. Google typically displays page titles up to about 60 characters and meta descriptions up to 160 before cutting them off with an ellipsis in search results — going over doesn't cause an error, but the truncated snippet can hurt click-through rates significantly. The platform limits panel in this tool tracks all of these simultaneously so you can write to multiple constraints at once without manual calculation.

What are stop words and why are they excluded from the keyword list?

Stop words are the grammatical connective tissue of a sentence — articles, prepositions, conjunctions and common auxiliary verbs like "the", "a", "is", "and", "to" and "of" — that appear in virtually every piece of text but carry no topical signal. If they were included in the keyword frequency list, they would dominate it entirely, making it impossible to see which substantive terms are actually characterising your content.

The keyword pills section filters them out and surfaces only the meaningful words that reflect what your copy is actually about. This makes it practical to verify at a glance that your intended topic keywords are appearing frequently enough before you publish. For a full ranked list of every word sorted by frequency — including stop words if you want them, with options for case-sensitive filtering and export — use our dedicated Word Frequency Counter.

How is reading time calculated?

Reading time is estimated at 200 words per minute, a broadly accepted average for general adult comprehension of digital text. A 1,000-word article returns an estimate of five minutes; a 500-word blog post estimates to two and a half minutes. The figure updates in real time as you type, so you can write directly to a target duration.

Real reading speed varies significantly depending on content type and audience. Dense academic or technical material is typically processed at 100–150 words per minute, while casual web copy may be skimmed at 250–300. For adjustable reading speed settings, a separate speaking time estimate useful for presentations and voice-overs, and side-by-side comparisons for different audience types, use our dedicated Reading Time Calculator.

What counts as a sentence, paragraph or line?

Sentence boundaries are detected wherever a full stop, exclamation mark or question mark appears followed by whitespace or the end of the text — matching the standard definition used by most readability analysis tools. A paragraph is counted as any block of text separated from another block by a blank line, consistent with both print and web typography conventions. If you press Enter once without a blank line between blocks, those blocks are counted as one paragraph.

A line is any text segment separated by a single line break, which means the line count can differ from the paragraph count when you use hard returns within a single paragraph. This distinction matters for poetry, code snippets and structured lists, where line breaks are meaningful even without blank-line separators. If your pasted content has accumulated duplicate lines from repeated copying, our Remove Duplicate Lines tool cleans those up before you count.

Can I use this to check SMS character limits?

Yes. The platform limits panel includes an SMS entry set at 160 characters, which matches the single-segment limit for standard GSM-7 encoding used by most global mobile carriers. Staying within 160 characters ensures your message is delivered as a single unit without splitting, which is both cheaper to send and more reliable to receive.

It is worth noting that if your message includes any character outside the GSM-7 set — curly or "smart" quotation marks, accented letters beyond basic Latin, emoji, or symbols like the euro sign — the encoding switches automatically to UCS-2 Unicode, which reduces the single-segment limit to just 70 characters. This tool counts raw character length rather than encoded byte length, so for messages that may trigger Unicode encoding, always verify the effective segment count with your messaging provider before sending at scale.

What is the difference between characters with and without spaces?

The "Characters" count includes every symbol in your text — letters, digits, punctuation and spaces. The "No Spaces" count strips all whitespace and counts only the printable symbols. The no-spaces figure is useful when a platform or brief specifies a character limit that explicitly excludes whitespace, which is common in academic journal submission guidelines and some print typesetting specifications.

It also gives a useful sense of information density: two texts with the same total character count but different no-spaces counts have different proportions of actual content versus whitespace. A no-spaces count significantly lower than the total character count suggests the text has been padded with extra spacing, which is often introduced when copying from PDFs or rich text editors. For counting words within a target range rather than characters, our Word Counter gives you words, sentences, paragraphs and reading time all in one view.

Does this tool work offline?

Once the page has loaded in your browser, all counting and analysis continues to work without an internet connection. All logic runs locally in JavaScript and nothing is transmitted externally, so the tool remains fully functional on flights, in areas with poor connectivity, or in environments where outbound data transfer is restricted.

The Download .txt button also works offline — it generates the file locally from whatever text is in the editor and saves it to your device without any server involvement. If you need to convert the case of your finalised text after editing, our Case Converter runs entirely in-browser with no server dependency either.