Character & Word Counter

How do I count characters in a piece of text?

Paste or type your text into the box above and the counts update instantly — there is no button to press and nothing is sent to a server. I built this character counter because I was tired of opening a word processor just to check whether a tweet, a meta description, or a form field fit inside its limit.

You get five numbers at once: characters with spaces, characters without spaces, UTF-8 bytes, words, and sentences. Each one refreshes the moment you stop typing.

What is the difference between characters and bytes?

A character is a single symbol you see, while a byte is how much storage that symbol takes in UTF-8. For plain English they are usually the same, but the moment you add an emoji, an accented letter, or CJK text (Chinese, Japanese, Korean), one character can take two, three, or four bytes.

That gap matters when a database column is defined as VARCHAR(255) in bytes, or when an SMS is billed by byte length. The UTF-8 bytes figure here uses the browser’s TextEncoder, the same encoding servers use, so the number you see is the number that will actually be stored.

This byte ladder follows a published standard. RFC 3629, the UTF-8 specification, puts it plainly:

“In UTF-8, characters from the U+0000..U+10FFFF range (the UTF-16 accessible range) are encoded using sequences of 1 to 4 octets.” — RFC 3629

In everyday terms: an ASCII letter is 1 byte, an accented letter like é is 2, a CJK ideograph or a Hangul syllable is 3, and most emoji are 4. You can reproduce the exact figure yourself with the browser’s TextEncoder API.

How are words and sentences counted?

Words are counted by splitting on whitespace, and sentences by splitting on ., !, and ?. A “word” is any run of non-space characters, so “don’t” counts as one and “e-mail” counts as one. Sentence counts are approximate by design — an abbreviation like “etc.” will nudge the number — but for essays, blog drafts, and social posts the estimate is close enough to be useful.

How many characters do popular platforms allow?

Every platform draws its line in a different place, and a few count length in ways that catch people off guard. These are the limits I reach for this counter to check:

Platform / standard	Length limit	How length is counted
X (Twitter) post, free account	280	weighted characters (CJK & emoji = 2, URL = 23)
X Premium post	25,000	weighted characters
X bio	160	weighted characters
SMS, GSM-7 encoding	160 (153 per segment once split)	7-bit characters
SMS, UCS-2 encoding	70 (67 per segment once split)	16-bit characters
Google meta description	no fixed limit (~pixel width)	display width, not character count

A few rules hide behind those numbers:

• On X, a link always counts as 23 characters no matter how long the real URL is, and each emoji or CJK character counts as 2 — so a post written in Korean or Japanese runs out of room near 140 characters rather than 280. The full counting rules live in the X developer docs.
• SMS is billed by segment, not by message. Plain GSM-7 text fits 160 characters in one segment, but a single emoji forces the whole message into UCS-2 and the ceiling drops to 70, as Twilio explains.
• Google trims the meta-description snippet by pixel width rather than character count, which is why the familiar “155–160” figure is only a rough guide:

“There’s no limit on how long a meta description can be, but the snippet is truncated in Google Search results as needed, typically to fit the device width.” — Google Search Central

When is a character counter actually useful?

The cases I reach for it most are length-limited writing. A few common ones:

• Meta descriptions, which Google typically truncates around 155–160 characters.
• Tweets and other social posts with hard character caps.
• Database fields and API payloads measured in bytes, not characters.
• Essays and assignments with a strict word count.

Because everything runs in your browser, you can paste confidential drafts without worrying about them ever leaving your machine.