Count characters, words, and bytes in your text instantly. Free character counter with and without spaces.
Character count matters whenever there's a limit — a college essay, a résumé cover letter, a tweet, a meta description, or a text message. This tool counts characters both with and without spaces, plus word count and byte count, so you always know exactly where you stand.
Most style guides and application forms (college essays, cover letters) count characters without spaces as the "true" length of your writing, since spaces don't add content. Social platforms and SMS systems usually count with spaces, since every keystroke occupies space in the message. Check the specific limit you're working against before submitting.
In UTF-8 encoding, a Latin letter takes 1 byte, but many non-Latin characters (Korean, Chinese, Japanese, emoji) take 3–4 bytes each. If a platform enforces a byte limit rather than a character limit, a message that "looks short" in Korean or Chinese can still get truncated or rejected. This matters for SMS gateways, some CMS fields, and legacy database columns.