# Character Counter

Count characters, words, sentences and bytes as you type, and see how it sits against SMS, meta description and social post limits.

Canonical page: https://filetity.com/character-counter

## Capabilities

- Free: Yes, with no watermark and no page limit.
- Account required: No. There is no account system.
- Processed on device: Yes. The file is read by your browser and never uploaded. There is no server to send it to.
- Formats: Any text in. Characters, characters without spaces, words, sentences, paragraphs, lines, UTF-16 units and UTF-8 bytes out, live.
- Limits: No length limit beyond what a text box will hold. The platform limits shown were read on 9 September 2026 and platforms change them without announcing it.
- Mobile: Yes, on any modern mobile browser. Large files are limited by the memory the phone gives the browser.
- Offline: Yes, once the page has loaded. The tool keeps working with no network connection.

## Questions

### Why do you show three different character counts?

Because limits disagree about what a character is. A person counts an emoji as one, JavaScript and a lot of databases count it as two UTF-16 units, and a byte limit counts it as four UTF-8 bytes. A caption that fits one of those can fail another, so all three are shown rather than picking one and hoping.

### Why does my SMS limit drop from 160 to 70?

Because a single character outside the GSM alphabet switches the whole message to Unicode encoding, and a Unicode SMS holds 70 characters instead of 160. A curly apostrophe pasted from a word processor does it, and so does one emoji, which is why a message that looks short suddenly costs three messages.

### Is the meta description limit really 160 characters?

It is a convention rather than a rule. Google truncates by pixel width, so a description full of narrow letters fits more and one full of capitals fits fewer. 160 is the number that usually survives, which is why it is the mark here, but it is a guide and not a threshold.

### How is the reading time worked out?

Words divided by 238 a minute, which is the mean for silent reading of English prose from Brysbaert's 2019 meta-analysis of 190 studies. Speaking aloud uses 150, a much softer figure. Both are averages across many people and neither is a measurement of you or your reader.

### How are sentences counted when there are abbreviations?

A full stop, question mark or exclamation mark ends a sentence, except after a common title like Dr or Mr and except inside a decimal number. It is a rule rather than an understanding of the text, so an unusual abbreviation will still be counted as an ending, and the sentence count is best treated as close rather than exact.

## Related tools

- [Text Repeater](https://filetity.com/text-repeater): Repeat any text as many times as you want, with a chosen separator.
- [Case Converter](https://filetity.com/case-converter): Change text between uppercase, lowercase, title case, camelCase and six more.