What gets counted, and what each limit really measures
The box reports three numbers and then compares the character total with four fixed ceilings. The total counts Unicode code points, so a plain letter, a digit, a space and a line break each add 1. The "No spaces" figure strips every whitespace character, including line breaks, before counting. Words are chunks separated by whitespace, which means a lone dash between two spaces is counted as a word.
| Limit shown | Number | What to know before you trust it |
|---|---|---|
| X / Twitter | 280 | X weights some characters differently: links are shortened to a fixed length, and many Chinese, Japanese and Korean characters count double. Check the platform's current rules for those cases. |
| SMS | 160 | The 160 figure applies to the basic GSM alphabet. One character outside it, such as an emoji or a curly quote, switches the message to Unicode encoding and the single-message limit drops to 70. |
| Meta description | 160 | Google truncates by pixel width rather than characters, so the practical range is roughly 150 to 160. The meta description guide covers this in detail. |
| Title tag | 60 | Also pixel based. Wide capitals use up more room than narrow letters, so 60 is a safe rule of thumb and not a hard cut-off. |
Worked example
Paste Save 20% on café gear — shop now! 🎉 and the counter shows:
- Characters: 35 (the emoji counts as 1, even though JavaScript stores it as two 16-bit units)
- No spaces: 27
- Words: 9, because the em dash and the emoji each form their own whitespace-separated chunk
- Limits: 245 left on X, 125 left for SMS and for a meta description, 25 left for a title tag
Where counts surprise people
- Composite emoji. A thumbs-up with a skin-tone modifier is two code points, and a three-person family emoji joined with zero-width joiners is five. The counter reports those numbers, which can be higher than the single glyph you see.
- Accents.
étyped as one character counts 1, but the same letter built fromeplus a combining accent counts 2. - Pasted line breaks. Each break adds a character. Text copied from a PDF can carry many of them, which you can remove with Remove Line Breaks.
- Hidden characters. Zero-width spaces count as characters but are invisible. If a total looks too high for what you can see, clean the text first; the invisible character generator shows what such characters are.
When the question is about length in words instead, the word counter adds sentences, paragraphs and reading time.