X character counter

X does not count characters the way your keyboard does: every link costs a flat 23 regardless of length, emoji cost 2 each, and most non-Latin text counts double. This counter applies those actual rules as you type, so the number you see here is the number the composer will hold you to.

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The count, as X counts it

0 / 280

Text, weighted
0
Links, 23 each
0 × 23
Emoji, 2 each
0 × 2

Start typing and the count updates as you go.

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How X actually counts, and why naive counters lie

Under the hood X assigns every character a weight. Text in the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic ranges, along with normal punctuation, costs 1. Nearly everything else costs 2: Chinese, Japanese, and Korean, most symbols, and every emoji, including the family and flag emoji that are technically several characters fused together but are charged as one unit of 2. Links skip the arithmetic entirely: X wraps every URL in its t.co shortener, so a link costs exactly 23 whether you pasted 15 characters or 150.

A counter that just measures string length gets all three of these wrong, which is why a post that some tool swore was 265 characters gets refused by the composer at 291, and why hand-shortening a URL to save space has never once worked. The breakdown panel above shows the three buckets separately, so when the total surprises you, you can see exactly which rule is responsible.

Budgeting the 280

The limit shapes good posts more than it constrains them. One link costs 23, which is 8% of your budget, so a post carrying a link earns its keep by spending the other 257 on a reason to click it. Emoji at 2 apiece are cheap individually and expensive as a habit. And if you use styled Unicode text for emphasis, remember it lives in the double-cost ranges: bold is a spending decision. When the post will not fit no matter what you cut, that is usually the material telling you it wants to be a thread, and the thread generator on this site will do the splitting properly.

Questions

What is the character limit on X?
280 characters for standard accounts. Premium subscribers can write much longer posts, but the feed folds anything past the standard length behind "Show more", so 280 stays the practical target even when the hard limit does not apply to you.
How does X count links?
Every link costs exactly 23 characters, no matter how long or short the URL is, because X wraps all links in its t.co shortener at a fixed length. A 90-character URL costs 23. So does a 15-character one, which means shortening links by hand buys you nothing.
Why do some characters count as two?
X weights characters. Most Latin, Cyrillic, and Greek text costs 1 per character; most other writing systems, including Chinese, Japanese, and Korean, cost 2, which is why the practical limit in those languages is about 140. Emoji also cost 2 each, including multi-part emoji that are technically several characters joined together.
Why do other counters give a different number?
Most counters use the text length a programming language reports, which fails in both directions on X: it overcharges links, which really cost a flat 23, and undercharges emoji and CJK text, which really cost 2 per character. This counter applies X's own weighting rules, so the number here matches what the composer will say.
Does styled Unicode text count differently?
Yes. The bold and italic letters that styled-text tools produce are special Unicode characters, and they sit in the ranges X charges 2 for. A fully bolded sentence costs double. If you style text with our X fonts generator, budget for that, and check the total here before posting.
What are the other X limits worth knowing?
Bio: 160 characters. Display name: 50. Direct messages: 10,000. Image alt text: 1,000. The 23-character link rule applies inside posts; your bio link is a separate field and does not spend bio characters.

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