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How many characters is my post, the way X counts?

X does not count characters, it sums a weight per character and divides by a scale. Latin, Greek, Cyrillic, Hebrew and Arabic weigh one; every other script weighs two, so a post in English gets 280 and the same post in Japanese gets 140. Every link counts as exactly 23 however long it is, and an emoji counts as two however many code points it is built from. This counter implements that, and shows the naive count beside it so you can see where the two disagree. LinkedIn and Threads are included, and neither weights anything.

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X0 / 280

280 left

LinkedIn post0 / 3,000

3,000 left

Threads0 / 500

500 left

X Premium0 / 25,000

25,000 left

How this works

  1. 1The text is normalised to NFC first, so an accent typed as a base plus a combining mark counts once rather than twice.
  2. 2Links are found the way X finds them, including bare hosts with no scheme, and each is charged the fixed transformed length of 23.
  3. 3Emoji are counted by grapheme cluster, so a family emoji built from eleven code points costs two rather than eleven.
  4. 4Every other character is looked up against the published weight ranges and charged one or two.
  5. 5The naive length is shown alongside, because the whole point is the gap between them.

What it cannot tell you

  • It implements the published configuration, not a live call to X. If X changes the weights, this is wrong until the numbers here are updated.
  • It cannot know whether your account has the longer Premium ceiling. Both are shown.
  • A quoted post, a poll or an image changes what fits in the rendered post. This counts the text you typed.

Questions people ask

How does X count characters?

By weight rather than by count. X sums a weight per character and divides by 100: characters in the Latin, Greek, Cyrillic, Hebrew and Arabic ranges weigh 100, everything else weighs 200. So the 280 limit is 280 characters of English and 140 of Japanese, Chinese, Korean or Thai.

How many characters does a link count as on X?

Exactly 23, however long the URL is. A five-character link and a 200-character tracking link both cost 23, which is why a counter that measures raw length tells you a post is over when it fits.

How many characters is an emoji on X?

Two, regardless of how many code points build it. A family emoji is several people joined by zero-width joiners and reports as eleven characters in most editors, but X charges it as one glyph at the default weight.

What is the character limit on LinkedIn and Threads?

A LinkedIn post allows 3,000 characters and Threads allows 500. Neither weights by script, and both count a link in full rather than transforming it to a fixed length, so a long link that costs 23 on X costs every one of its characters on both.

Why does my post count differently in different tools?

Most counters report the string length, which is wrong in three ways at once: it over-counts long links, over-counts every emoji, and under-counts every non-Latin script. The three disagree in different directions, so two wrong counters rarely agree with each other either.

The short version, if you would rather not run it

The 280 limit is the best known number on X and one of the least accurately understood, because it is not a count of characters. It is a budget of weight. The configuration X publishes for its own clients sets a maximum weighted length of 280 and a scale of 100, then assigns each character a weight of 100 or 200 depending on which Unicode range it falls in. Latin, Greek, Cyrillic, Hebrew, Arabic and general punctuation are in the cheap ranges. Everything else, which includes Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Thai and Devanagari, costs double.

The practical consequence is that the same thought costs different amounts in different languages, and a counter that reports string length is wrong for most of the world. It is also wrong for everybody on two other counts. Links are transformed to a fixed length of 23 before the budget is computed, so a long tracking URL is cheap and a short link is expensive, and below 23 characters you are paying more for the link than writing it out would cost. Emoji are counted once as a glyph rather than by their code points, so the family and profession sequences that report as eight or eleven characters in a text editor cost two.

None of that is obscure and all of it is published, which makes the number of counters that get it wrong the surprising part. The reason it matters is that the failure is silent and asymmetric. A counter that over-counts makes you cut a sentence that fitted. A counter that under-counts lets you hit post and find the end of your own argument truncated.

The other two networks here work differently and the difference catches people moving a post between them. LinkedIn and Threads count what a reader can see, and they count a link in full. A post built to sit just under 280 on X, carrying a long link that cost 23 there, can be a hundred characters longer on LinkedIn than the writer expects. Going the other way, a LinkedIn post has ten times the room and does not need the compression.

The other tools

How many characters is my post, the way X counts? · InstinctGTM