Character counter

Character limits by platform

The limits the counter checks, taken from each platform's own help pages or developer documentation on October 31, 2026. Platforms change their limits from time to time, so if a post is right at the edge, the box you type it into has the final word. Limits we could not confirm on the platform's own pages, such as an Instagram bio or a Facebook post, are left out rather than guessed.

"Characters" means characters as you see them, so an emoji counts once. TikTok documents its caption limit for posting apps in UTF-16 code units, where most emoji take two, so that row counts them twice. The TikTok app itself may allow longer captions than apps that post for you.

How text messages are counted

A text message (SMS) carries 140 bytes. In the standard GSM 7-bit alphabet, which covers English letters, digits, common punctuation and some accented letters such as é, ü and ñ, that is room for 160 characters. A few symbols, € [ ] { } ~ ^ | and \, come from an extension table and take two places each.

If a message contains even one character outside that alphabet, the phone sends the whole message in Unicode (UCS-2) instead, where each character takes two bytes and only 70 fit. Messages longer than one text are split into parts that your phone joins back together; each part gives up some room to the joining header, leaving 153 GSM characters or 67 Unicode ones. Most emoji take two places in Unicode.

The usual trap is punctuation pasted from a word processor or a phone's keyboard: a curly apostrophe looks almost the same as a straight one, but it is not in the GSM alphabet. Here is the same booking reminder, worked out by the counter:

The plain version is 136 characters and fits in 1 text. Changing a single apostrophe to a curly one turns it into 3 texts. If you send reminders or marketing messages in bulk and pay per part, that one character means paying for 3 texts instead of 1. Use Replace with plain characters to swap curly quotes, long dashes and ellipses for their GSM versions. Some phones and SMS services do this for you, and some use national alphabets (for Turkish or Portuguese, for example) that change the numbers slightly.

How X counts characters

X allows 280 in a standard post but does not count every character the same. Following its published rules, Latin letters, digits, punctuation and most other alphabets count as 1; emoji count as 2 however they are built; Chinese, Japanese and Korean characters count as 2; and any link counts as 23, because X shortens it.

Titles and meta descriptions

Search results show your page title and often your meta description. Google sets no character limit for either; it cuts them to fit the screen, so a title full of wide letters is shortened sooner than one of narrow letters. Keeping titles to about 60 characters and descriptions to about 155 to 160 means they usually show in full. Put the words that matter first, so a shortened version still makes sense.

For longer pieces, the word counter adds reading time and page estimates. To fix capitals in a title, use the case converter, and to draft posts over several visits, the online notepad saves as you type.