Character Counter

These are limits, not targets. A 280-character post that says one thing clearly will outperform a 280-character post that had to be squeezed.

Each of these pages opens the counter set to that platform’s limits, with every figure linked to the platform’s own help or developer pages:

• LinkedIn
• Instagram
• X (Twitter)
• YouTube
• TikTok
• SMS
• UCAS personal statement

Use characters when the constraint is a display or a field: a headline, an SMS, a database column, an advertisement. Use words when the constraint is effort or time: an essay, an article, a speech. A 1,000-word article is a meaningful brief; a 5,800-character article is the same length expressed in a way nobody can plan around.

As a rough conversion, English prose averages about 5.8 characters per word including the space that follows it. So 100 words is roughly 580 characters, and 500 characters is roughly 86 words. Our full comparison goes into when each one is the right measure.

Text is counted by character rather than by byte. That means an accented letter such as “é” counts as one, an emoji counts as one, and a line break counts as one. Counting by byte — the way some older systems do — would make “é” count as two and many emoji count as four.

If you need the count without spaces, it is shown beside the main figure and updates at the same time. It excludes spaces, tabs and line breaks. The letters figure goes one step further and leaves out numbers, punctuation and symbols too.

Counting Chinese? The Chinese character counter separates Chinese characters from punctuation and English words.