Character & Word Counter with Platform Limits
Type or paste text and watch every count update live: characters with and without spaces, words, sentences, paragraphs, and lines — plus a panel showing exactly how many characters you have left (or are over) for an X post, Instagram caption, LinkedIn post, SMS, meta title, and meta description.
Platform limits
Limits compare against the with-spaces character count. X counts every link as 23 characters and some emoji as 2, so treat the X figure as an estimate when your post contains either.
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Try Moda free →How emoji and accents are counted
This counter counts what you see, not raw bytes: each emoji is one character, even multi-part ones like 👩👩👧 that are technically several code points joined together, and an accented é is one character however it was typed. That matters because naive counters that measure UTF-16 length report 👩👩👧 as 8 characters. Platforms are less generous — X counts most emoji as 2 and SMS switches to a smaller 70-character segment the moment a single emoji appears — so a message heavy on emoji can exceed a platform budget before this counter says so.
What counts as a word, a sentence, a paragraph
Words are found with Unicode-aware segmentation: contractions like "don't" and numbers like "2026" each count once, stray punctuation counts zero, and a hyphenated compound like "well-known" counts as two words (word processors vary on that one, which explains most small count differences between tools). Sentences are runs of text ended by a period, question mark, exclamation point, or ellipsis; an unterminated final fragment still counts as one. Paragraphs are blocks separated by blank lines, so a soft line break inside a paragraph does not split it.
Where the platform limits come from
X posts cap at 280 characters (URLs always count as 23 there, no matter their real length). Instagram captions cap at 2,200 and LinkedIn posts at 3,000 — both hard limits that block publishing. A single SMS segment is 160 GSM characters; longer messages still send but split into multiple billed segments. The meta title (~60) and meta description (~160) figures are different in kind: search engines truncate the display around those widths rather than rejecting anything, so treat them as guidance for what stays visible, not as caps.
Frequently asked questions
Do spaces and line breaks count as characters?
Yes — the main character count includes spaces and line breaks, because that is what platform limits measure. The "without spaces" figure excludes all whitespace, which is the convention used for some academic and translation work.
Why does X reject my post when this counter says it fits?
X applies weighted counting: every URL costs a flat 23 characters regardless of its length, and most emoji and many non-Latin characters cost 2. Plain prose matches this counter one-for-one; posts with links or emoji can weigh more on X than they do here.
Is 60 characters a hard limit for meta titles?
No. Search engines will index a longer title — they just truncate what searchers see at roughly 600 pixels, which lands near 60 characters for average-width text. Wide letters truncate earlier, narrow ones later, so use the count as a strong guideline and keep your key phrase early.
How is the word count affected by hyphens and apostrophes?
"Don't" counts as one word, while "well-known" counts as two — the hyphen is treated as a separator, as in Unicode text segmentation. Numbers like "2026" count as words too, and punctuation standing alone is never counted.
Does my text leave the browser?
No. All counting happens locally in your browser as you type — nothing is uploaded, stored, or logged, so it is safe to paste drafts and confidential copy.