Character limits show up constantly, and they're rarely round, memorable numbers. A quick reference, plus how to actually check your text before you hit publish or send.
Common limits worth knowing
- SMS (single segment): 160 characters for plain text; a message any longer gets split into multiple segments (and multiple charges, on some carriers) — or drops to 70 characters per segment if the message contains certain emoji or non-Latin characters, because those require a different text encoding.
- X/Twitter: 280 characters for most accounts, counting every character including spaces and punctuation.
- Meta description (SEO): no hard character cap enforced by Google, but anything much beyond roughly 155-160 characters tends to get truncated with "…" in search results — so it's a practical, not strict, limit.
- Title tag (SEO): similarly no hard cap, but titles beyond roughly 50-60 characters commonly get cut off in search results.
- Instagram caption: a generous 2,200-character technical limit, though only the first couple of lines show before "more" — so the practical limit for what people actually read is much shorter than the platform's real cap.
Why "with spaces" vs. "without spaces" matters
Almost every platform limit above counts spaces as characters — a 280-character tweet includes every space. The "without spaces" number some tools show is mainly useful for a different purpose: rough estimates of typing effort or, historically, some print/typesetting contexts. When checking against a real platform limit, use the with-spaces count.
Using the tool
Our Character Counter shows both counts side by side as you type, so you can check text against whichever limit actually applies without doing the arithmetic yourself. Try it here: Character Counter.