Character Counter

The three limits people get wrong

SMS is not 160 characters

It is 160 only while every character sits inside the GSM-7 alphabet. One character outside it — an emoji, a curly quote pasted from Word, an em dash, or the ellipsis character — switches the whole message to UCS-2 encoding and the limit drops to 70. A 150-character message costs one segment; add a single emoji and the same message costs three.

Multi-part messages are worse than they look. Once a message spans segments, each one carries a header, so the per-segment budget falls to 153 (GSM-7) or 67 (UCS-2). The panel above shows which character forced the change, so you can decide whether it earns its place.

Google truncates by pixels, not characters

Search snippets are cut at a pixel width, so two descriptions with identical character counts can truncate in completely different places. Capitals and wide letters like m and w eat the budget; narrow ones like i and l barely touch it. That is why "155 characters" advice keeps failing — the real budget is roughly 990 pixels for a description and 580 for a title.

Platform limits are counted in code points, not bytes

Most platforms count what a person would call a character, so an emoji is one. But a few count UTF-16 units, where an emoji is two, and a flag or a family emoji can be four or more. We count code points everywhere, which matches most platforms. Treat X and Bluesky as approximate: X weights CJK characters double and fixes every URL at 23 characters, and Bluesky counts graphemes, so a compound emoji costs one there and several here.

Reading and speaking time

Reading time uses 238 words per minute, the average silent reading speed for adult English prose from Brysbaert's 2019 meta-analysis of 190 studies — a better basis than the 200 or 250 usually quoted without a source. Speaking time uses 150 words per minute, a comfortable presentation pace. If you are timing a talk, read it aloud once and trust the stopwatch over any estimate.

Which count does your marker actually mean?

Word limits are set by people, but they are enforced by software, and the two rarely agree. Microsoft Word counts a hyphenated compound like well-known as one word; Google Docs agrees, but many plagiarism and submission systems split it into two. A number written as 3,500 is one word everywhere, while 3 500 is two. Footnotes, captions, headings and the reference list are counted by some departments and excluded by others.

The practical rule is to write to about 95% of the stated limit and stop worrying about the last few words. A 2,000-word essay handed in at 1,900 words is never penalised; one at 2,100 sometimes is. If the brief gives a tolerance — usually plus or minus 10% — it is telling you the count will not be checked to the digit. If it does not, assume the limit is hard and leave yourself the margin.

The counter above reports words split on whitespace, which is the same rule Word and Google Docs use. Where it will differ from your word processor is content you have not pasted in: it counts exactly the text in the box, so paste the body of the essay without the title page and the bibliography if those are excluded from your limit.

Writing to a character limit without sounding clipped

Hard character limits — a meta description, a bio, a subject line — reward a different kind of editing from word limits. Cutting whole ideas is usually wrong at this scale; what works is removing the scaffolding that surrounds a good sentence. The reliable targets, in order: hedges (quite, fairly, somewhat), stock openers (In this article we will), and the phrase in order to, which is almost always just to.

After that, prefer the shorter of two true statements rather than compressing one long one. "Free citation generator, no sign-up" is 38 characters and complete. "A tool that lets you generate citations without needing to create an account" is 71 characters and says less, because the reader has to hold more of it in their head to get the same fact.

One habit worth building: write past the limit first, then cut. Composing inside the limit makes you edit while drafting, and the result usually reads as though something was removed — because it was, before it was ever written down.

Nothing leaves your device

Every count here is computed in your browser. Your draft is kept in your own browser storage so it survives closing the tab, and it is never uploaded. You can disconnect from the internet and the tool keeps working — which matters if you are counting something confidential.

That also means the counter has no idea what you are writing, cannot suggest anything, and will not try to sell you a subscription when you paste more than a few hundred words. If you want the numbers explained rather than just displayed, the readability checker scores the same text against six formulas and highlights the sentences doing the damage.