Character Counter — Live Character & Word Count Online
Count characters with and without spaces, plus words and lines, updating live as you type. Stay under the limits for SMS, tweets, and SEO meta descriptions at a glance.
What is Character Counter?
Character Counter tallies your text in real time: total characters, characters excluding spaces, words, and lines, plus UTF-8 byte length. Word counts split on whitespace, so multiple spaces collapse to one boundary. It is built for writing to a budget — fitting a headline into an SEO title limit, a post into a tweet, or a message into one SMS segment — by showing the count update with every keystroke and flagging common limits.
Examples
Tools that just work.
Characters: 21 · Without spaces: 18 · Words: 4
The three spaces between the four words account for the difference between the two character totals.
How to use this tool
- Type or paste your text into the box.
- Read the live character and word counts.
- Watch the limit hints as you edit.
When to use it
- Trimming an SEO meta description to stay within the ~155–160 characters Google typically shows.
- Keeping a post under the 280-character limit on X / Twitter.
- Checking a text message fits in a single 160-character SMS segment.
- Hitting a minimum or maximum length on a form field, bio, or product description.
Tips & gotchas
- It shows characters both with and without spaces — many platforms count spaces, so use the 'with spaces' total for limits.
- Handy reference limits: one SMS segment is 160 characters, X / Twitter is 280, and a meta description is best around 155–160.
- Byte length matters when a system limits by bytes, not characters: a UTF-8 emoji or Korean character can take 3–4 bytes each.
- Word counts split on whitespace, so a hyphenated-word counts as one and a trailing space does not add a word.
Features
- Characters with and without spaces
- Word and line counts
- Byte length (UTF-8)
- Common limit hints (SMS, Twitter/X, meta description)
- Updates live as you type
Specifications
| Counts | Characters (with/without spaces), words, lines |
|---|---|
| Byte length | UTF-8 bytes |
| Word rule | Whitespace-separated tokens |
| Updates | Live, on every keystroke |
This tool runs in your browser. Your files and text are not uploaded to our servers, and we do not store your input.
Frequently asked questions
Does it count spaces?+
It shows both totals at once: characters including spaces and characters excluding spaces, so you can match whichever a given platform uses.
What character limits should I aim for?+
A single SMS is 160 characters, an X / Twitter post is 280, and an SEO meta description is best kept around 155–160 so it isn't truncated in search results.
Why is the byte length higher than the character count?+
Characters outside basic ASCII — accents, emoji, Korean, CJK — take more than one byte in UTF-8. If a system limits by bytes, those characters count for more than one each.
How are words counted?+
Words are sequences separated by whitespace, so extra spaces between words don't inflate the count and a hyphenated word is counted once.
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