Text truncator
Set a limit in characters or words and get the text cut to fit, ending on a whole word with an ellipsis if you like. Handy for meta descriptions, product titles, notification previews and lists where every line must stay short.
Runs in your browser: nothing you enter is sent anywhere.
How to use it
- Paste the text.
- Enter the limit and choose characters or words.
- Pick the ending and whether to keep whole words, or to shorten each line on its own.
- Copy the result. The line underneath shows the length before and after.
How it works
For characters, the room for text is the limit minus the length of the ending. The text is cut there; with whole words on, the cut moves back to the last space if it fell inside a word. Trailing spaces and dangling punctuation are removed and the ending is added. For words, the text is kept up to the end of the last allowed word.
Worked example
The quick brown fox jumps with a limit of 15 characters and the … ending: the room is 15 − 1 = 14 characters, The quick brow. That ends inside “brown”, so the cut moves back to The quick, giving The quick…, 10 characters. Without the word rule it would be The quick brow…, exactly 15.
Tips
- Search results often shorten descriptions to roughly 150–160 characters; write the important part first rather than relying on the cut.
- Three dots take three characters; the single … character saves two.
Frequently asked questions
Does the ellipsis count towards the limit?
For characters, yes - the result including the ellipsis never exceeds the limit, which is what length limits on websites and forms need. For words, the ellipsis is added after the last kept word and is not counted as a word.
What does "Do not cut words" do?
If the limit falls inside a word, the text is cut back to the end of the previous word instead. Commas, colons and dashes left dangling at the end are removed before the ellipsis. A single word longer than the limit is cut where it must be.
How are characters counted?
As visible characters, so an emoji, an accented letter written as two code points or a flag counts as one. Spaces and punctuation count too. Text that already fits is returned unchanged.
When should I truncate each line separately?
When the text is a list - product names, headlines, file names - and every line has its own limit. Line breaks are kept, and only lines over the limit are shortened.