Characters, tashkeel, hashtags, and why “it looked short in Notes” is not a strategy.
Arabic captions die in two ways: the platform truncates them, or tashkeel and emoji blow a “character” budget you thought was words. Word Counter shows words, characters, and lines as the browser sees them — which is closer to what Instagram and ads managers count than a glance in Notes.
Tashkeel is real Unicode. If you draft with full harakat for a Quranic quote or a formal brand line, the count jumps. Some apps strip marks on publish; others keep them. Count the version you will actually post. Hashtags without spaces are one word; a line break is a new line and often a new word boundary.
Bilingual captions (Arabic first, English after a blank line) need two passes: readability for humans, then length for the box. Run Text Cleaner if you pasted from WhatsApp — hidden characters make “short” text fail a form. For Google title/description pairs, SEO Meta Length is the better ruler than a generic counter.
The point is not to worship numbers. It is to stop discovering the cut on a live post. Paste, trim one sentence, paste again. That loop is the whole skill.
Keywords: Arabic, captions, word count