Twitter Character Counter

X doesn't count raw character length the way a typical text editor does. It uses a weighted system, plus a couple of special rules that catch most people off guard the first time.

URLs always count as 23 characters. X automatically wraps every link with its t.co shortener. Whether you paste a 12-character link or a 600-character one, the counter treats it as 23. That means the URL itself doesn't get longer if you add tracking parameters, which is useful to know when you're squeezing into the 280 limit.

Most emoji count as 2 characters. Emoji, CJK characters (Chinese, Japanese, Korean), and most non-Latin scripts are weighted at 2 per glyph. Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic characters mostly count as 1. A single 🔥 takes the same space as two letters.

Newlines count as 1. Hitting return doesn't cost you extra. Line breaks count the same as any single character. Spaces also count as 1.

For the official rules, see X's developer documentation on counting characters. The counter on this page mirrors X's behavior in essentially every real-world post.

The 280-character standard limit applies to every X account. It's been the cap since November 2017, when Twitter doubled the original 140-character ceiling. Standard posts surface in everyone's home feed, search, and notifications without truncation.

The 25,000-character limit is unlocked with X Premium and is meant for long-form essays, threads-as-single-posts, code samples, and announcements that don't fit a thread. Long posts collapse to a "Show more" preview in the timeline, so the first sentence still has to earn the click. Use 25,000 when the structure of the piece (a story, an argument, a teardown) actually benefits from staying together. Use 280 when the goal is reach: short posts get more impressions, more replies, and more reposts.