What counts as a character
This counter counts what you see. An emoji such as 👋, a flag or an accented letter counts as one character, even though phones and websites store some of them as several hidden codes. Spaces and line breaks are characters too, which is why you also see a count without spaces.
Some sites count differently. X counts most emoji and all Chinese, Japanese and Korean characters as two, and some form fields count the hidden codes. If a limit is strict, leave a little room.
Common limits
| Where | Limit used here | Why it matters |
|---|---|---|
| Page title (SEO) | 60 | Longer titles are often cut off in Google results |
| Meta description | 160 | Search results usually show about 150 to 160 characters |
| X (Twitter) post | 280 | The limit for a standard account |
| YouTube title | 100 | The maximum YouTube allows |
| Instagram caption | 2,200 | Only the first two lines show before “more” |
| LinkedIn post | 3,000 | Long posts fold after about 210 characters |
Search engines really measure titles in pixels, not characters, so a title full of wide letters such as W and M can be cut sooner.
SMS: why some messages split early
A text in plain English uses the GSM-7 alphabet and fits 160 characters. Longer texts split into parts of 153 characters, because each part carries a small header. A few symbols, such as € [ ] { } ~ and , count as two.
As soon as a message contains a character outside GSM-7, such as Urdu, Hindi or Arabic script or most emoji, the whole message switches to Unicode. Then one message holds only 70 characters and each part of a longer one holds 67. A single emoji can double the cost of a bulk SMS, so check before you send.
Your text stays in your browser and is never uploaded.