Character Counter
Count characters (with and without spaces), words and lines.
Count exactly how many characters your text has — with and without spaces — plus words and lines, live as you type. Perfect for staying within limits on tweets, bios, meta descriptions and forms.
Formula / method
Examples
11 chars, 2 words
3 chars
What gets counted
Paste or type any text and this tool reports the character count both including and excluding spaces, along with the number of words and lines. Words are found by splitting on whitespace, so runs of multiple spaces still count as one break. Lines are counted by the line breaks you have entered, which matters when you paste formatted text.
Everything updates as you type and stays on your device; nothing is uploaded, which is useful when the text is private or unpublished.
Why character limits matter
Many platforms police length by characters, not words: a classic tweet was capped at 280, SMS messages split after 160, and search-result meta descriptions get truncated around 155-160 characters. Knowing the count with and without spaces helps you fit these windows without guesswork.
Be aware that some systems count emoji and certain accented characters as more than one unit internally, so a strict API limit may differ slightly from a plain character tally. If you care about word count for an essay or article, the same figures here cover that; for finding the most-used words, try the word-frequency tool on UtilGears.
Where it's used
- Staying within a social-media caption or bio character limit
- Trimming an SEO meta description to about 155–160 characters
- Checking an SMS stays under 160 characters so it does not split
- Meeting a form field's maximum length
- Counting characters for ad copy or a headline limit
Real-world examples
- "Hello world" is 11 characters with spaces, 10 without, and 2 words.
- A meta description of 172 characters will likely be truncated in Google results, so trim it toward 155.
- A 158-character text message fits in one SMS; 165 characters splits into two.
A bit of history
The 160-character SMS limit was set in 1985 by German engineer Friedhelm Hillebrand, who sat at a typewriter and found that most short messages and postcard texts fit within about 160 characters.
Did you know?
Twitter's original 140-character limit came from SMS: a text message held 160 characters, and Twitter reserved 20 of them for the username, leaving 140 for the tweet.
FAQ
How is this different from the Word Counter?
The Word Counter focuses on words and reading time; this focuses on exact character counts (with and without spaces) — ideal for character limits.