text_fields Character & Word Counter star

How It Works

As you type or paste, this tool instantly counts characters (with and without spaces), words, sentences and lines. The numbers matter because almost every platform you write for enforces a hard character limit, and going one character over usually has a real consequence rather than a cosmetic one: an X (Twitter) post caps at 280 characters, an Instagram caption at 2,200, a Google search result title truncates around 60 characters, a meta description around 160, and application forms frequently cut text off mid-word at their field limit.

SMS is the case where the stakes are least obvious and most costly. A standard text message uses the GSM 7-bit alphabet and fits 160 characters into a single message segment. The moment your message contains a character outside that basic alphabet — an emoji, or Turkish letters like ç, ğ, ı, ö, ş, ü — the encoding silently switches to UCS-2 (Unicode), and the per-segment limit drops to just 70 characters. A 150-character message that would have fit in one SMS as plain text can split into three or more billed segments the instant a single emoji is added, and most people sending it never realize why their message suddenly "cost" more or arrived as fragments.

What to Know Before You Use It

• The counter shows both totals: characters including spaces and line breaks, and characters excluding spaces — most platforms, including X/Twitter, count spaces toward their limit, so use the "with spaces" number when checking a hard cap.
• Word count splits text on whitespace, treating consecutive spaces or line breaks as a single separator — the same method Word and Google Docs use, so the number should match what those tools report.
• One emoji, accented letter, or non-Latin character in an SMS can shrink your per-message budget from 160 characters to 70 — check your message for special characters before assuming it will send as a single text.
• Everything runs locally in your browser; your text is never uploaded or sent to a server.