Characters are not as simple as they look
Most of the time “characters” means what you think it means. The trouble starts with emoji, accented letters and anything outside basic Latin, because different systems count those differently.
- Characters here are user-perceived characters, which Unicode calls grapheme clusters. The family emoji 👨👩👧 is built from five code points but counts as one. So does “é”, whether it was typed as one character or as “e” plus a combining accent.
- UTF-16 code units are what many programming languages, and the SMS UCS-2 encoding, count. Most emoji take two.
- UTF-8 bytes are what some limits, such as YouTube’s description limit, really measure. An accented letter takes two bytes and an emoji usually four.
Platform limits
The panel checks your text against each limit using that platform’s own way of counting:
| Where | Limit | How it is counted |
|---|---|---|
| X (Twitter) post | 280 | Weighted: links count 23, emoji 2, CJK and most non-Latin characters 2 |
| Bluesky post | 300 | User-perceived characters (graphemes) |
| Threads post | 500 | Characters; Threads counts each emoji by its UTF-8 bytes, so emoji use up more |
| Mastodon post | 500 | Default limit (servers can change it); links count 23 |
| Instagram caption | 2,200 | Characters; also at most 30 hashtags |
| LinkedIn post | 3,000 | Characters |
| YouTube title | 100 | Characters |
| YouTube description | 5,000 bytes | UTF-8 bytes, not characters: accented letters take 2, emoji 4 |
| Pinterest description | 800 | Characters |
| Title tag (search results) | 50–60 | Guideline, not a limit: Google truncates by pixel width (about 600 px on desktop) |
| Meta description | 150–160 | Guideline: Google truncates by width and often writes its own snippet |
| SMS (one message) | 160 | 160 GSM-7 characters or 70 UCS-2; longer messages split into 153 or 67 per part |
Checked 2026-10-26. Platforms change their limits; the linked pages are the official sources. Test your text in the character counter.
X (Twitter) weights characters. Letters, digits and most punctuation in the Latin ranges count 1. Chinese, Japanese and Korean characters count 2, every emoji counts 2 however many code points it has, and any link counts 23. So a post in Japanese holds about 140 characters, not 280. We follow X’s published open-source counting rules (twitter-text, version 3).
Mastodon counts any link as 23 characters, and it counts a mention by its username only, without the server name. Threads counts each emoji by its byte length, so emoji use up the limit faster than the count here suggests.
SMS: one character can double the cost
A text message holds 160 characters only if every character is in the GSM-7 alphabet. One character outside it, such as a curly apostrophe (’), an emoji or a letter like “ó”, switches the whole message to UCS-2. Then a single message holds just 70 characters. Longer messages are split into parts of 153 (GSM-7) or 67 (UCS-2), and each part is billed as a message.
The SMS panel shows the encoding, the units used and the number of parts, and it lists any characters that forced UCS-2. Make SMS-safe replaces curly quotes, dashes and the ellipsis character with plain equivalents, which is often enough to get back to GSM-7. A few GSM-7 characters, including €, [, ], {, }, ^, ~, | and \, cost two units each. The SMS guide explains the details.
Titles and meta descriptions
Search engines cut titles and snippets by pixel width, not by character count. A title of 50 to 60 characters usually fits on a desktop results page, and a meta description of about 150 to 160 characters. Wide letters such as “W” and “M” use the space faster than narrow ones such as “i” and “l”. Treat the ranges as a guide and put the important words first. Google also rewrites titles and snippets when it thinks its own version fits the search better. See title tag and meta description length.
Why does my phone show a different count?
Your phone may count UTF-16 units, or it may switch encodings without telling you. Compare its number with the UTF-16 line here.
Do spaces count?
Yes, on every platform listed here. “Without spaces” is shown for assignments and forms that ask for it.