Character Counter & Word Counter

Hard limits vs. soft limits

Two different things get called a "character limit," and it changes what going over actually costs you.

The soft limit is the one most people are actually writing against, and almost no counter shows it. A LinkedIn post has 3,000 characters and roughly 140 useful ones: the rest is behind a tap nobody takes. So the tool above renders the fold directly — type into it and you see the exact text that appears before "see more", with everything after the cut dimmed behind a line, plus how the same opening holds up on every other feed that truncates.

Where each feed cuts, and on which device:

Writing the hook itself is a different craft from measuring it — for what actually earns the tap, see styling LinkedIn hooks to stand out.

Two honest caveats. These are observed UI behaviour, not published limits, so treat them as "what reliably shows" rather than exact thresholds — and feeds also cut on line count, so three early line breaks can truncate a post well short of any character number. If your opening depends on a list, check it in the real composer too.

Every platform character limit in this checker

The same limits the live checker above uses, as a reference table. Jump to: X/Twitter · Discord · Instagram · TikTok · SMS · how each platform counts.

Posts & messages

Bios & profiles

Usernames, titles & SMS

Why your character count doesn't match the platform's

"How many characters is this?" has more than one correct answer, because platforms count in different units. The same text can have four different lengths:

All four are shown live in the stats above, so when a form says your text is too long while your word processor disagrees, you can see exactly which count the form is using. Two platforms need special rules on top:

X / Twitter counts by weight, not characters. Per X's own published algorithm (the twitter-text library), every URL counts as exactly 23, basic Latin letters count as 1, and almost everything else — CJK characters, most emoji, and every "fancy font" Unicode letter — counts as 2. A fully styled 𝗯𝗼𝗹𝗱 post therefore fits only 140 visible letters in the 280 budget. The "X / Twitter post" option in the checker above implements this real algorithm.

SMS is counted in segments, and one character can triple your bill. A text message holds 160 characters only while every character is in the old GSM-7 alphabet. One emoji, curly quote (’ pasted from Word), or accented letter outside it (ş, ő, ą, Vietnamese diacritics…) silently switches the whole message to Unicode mode — 70 characters per segment, 67 when it splits. The "SMS text message" option above detects this and names the exact character that flipped your message.

Counting fancy fonts and styled text

Styled Unicode text — 𝐛𝐨𝐥𝐝, 𝓈𝒸𝓇𝒾𝓅𝓉, 𝔤𝔬𝔱𝔥𝔦𝔠 letters from the UltraTextGen generator — looks like normal letters but usually lives in Unicode's supplementary planes, so each letter costs 2 UTF-16 units, 4 bytes, and 2 of X's 280. That's why a 10-letter styled name can be rejected by a 12-character game field. Paste your styled text into the counter above to see its real cost in every counting mode before you use it — and if a name keeps getting rejected, see why game names get rejected.

Character counting, answered