Characters, letters, and spaces
“Characters” counts everything you can type: letters, numbers, spaces, punctuation, and emoji. “Without spaces” leaves out spaces, tabs, and line breaks. “Letters” counts only letters, in any alphabet, so it ignores numbers and punctuation too. Characters are counted by Unicode code point: most emoji count as one, but an emoji with a skin tone, or a flag, counts as two or more because it is built from several code points.
Why your count might differ
Some platforms count differently. X counts most emoji and Chinese, Japanese, and Korean characters as two, and a text message drops from 160 to 70 characters as soon as it contains an emoji or another character outside the basic SMS alphabet. Google cuts titles and descriptions by width on screen rather than by an exact number, so treat 60 and 155 as safe rules of thumb.
Character count in Word and Google Docs
In Microsoft Word, click the word count in the status bar to see characters with and without spaces. In Google Docs, use Tools → Word count. For a full list of limits for essays, ads, and social media, see word and character limits.