Need to quickly count characters and words? Whether you're managing social media post lengths, checking SEO title character counts, or counting words for academic papers, this free online character counter provides real-time statistics for characters, words, sentences, paragraphs, lines, and byte size.
What Does This Character Counter Track?
This online character counter provides 7 detailed text statistics: character count (all characters), characters without spaces, word count (space-separated), sentence count (separated by periods, etc.), paragraph count (separated by blank lines), line count, and byte size. All statistics update in real-time as you type or edit.
Common Character Limits
- Twitter/X: 280 characters
- Instagram bio: 150 characters
- SEO title: 50-60 characters optimal
- Meta description: 150-160 characters
- SMS: 160 characters (7-bit)
- LinkedIn headline: 120 characters
- Essay abstracts: typically 150-300 words
Why Characters and Words Differ
Character count includes every single character in your text - letters, numbers, punctuation, and spaces. Word count measures space-separated words. For languages like Chinese or Japanese that don't use spaces between words, the word count may show fewer "words" than expected. For such languages, focus on character count instead of word count.
FAQ
Q: How are spaces and line breaks counted?
A: Spaces and line breaks are included in the total character count. If you want to count only actual content characters, refer to the 'No Spaces' count. Line breaks take up different byte sizes depending on the operating system (2 bytes on Windows, 1 byte on Mac/Linux).
Q: Why is byte size different from character count?
A: Byte size depends on character encoding. In UTF-8, ASCII characters (English letters, numbers) take 1 byte each, while characters from other languages may take 2-4 bytes. Emoji typically take 4 bytes. This is why byte size often exceeds character count.
Q: How can I use this for SEO optimization?
A: Search engines have character limits: titles should be 50-60 characters, meta descriptions 150-160 characters. Content beyond these limits gets truncated with ellipsis. Use this counter to precisely control your SEO copy length and ensure important information displays fully in search results.