Question: How many characters long can tweets be?
Show answer
280 characters.
Tweets on Twitter, one of the most popular social media platforms, can be up to 280 characters long. This character limit includes letters, numbers, punctuation, and spaces.
Twitter originally had a limit of 140 characters when it was launched in 2006. This was designed to fit within the 160-character limit of SMS messages, with the extra 20 characters reserved for the user’s handle. This concise format fostered creativity and brevity among users.
However, Twitter decided to double the character limit to 280 in November 2017, after a trial run showed that users appreciated having more space to express their thoughts. The new limit applies to tweets in all languages except Japanese, Korean, and Chinese, due to the denser writing systems of these languages which allow for more information to be conveyed in fewer characters.
Twitter’s character limit has played a role in shaping online communication, promoting succinct and punchy messages. Despite the increased limit, the culture of brevity and immediacy remains a hallmark of the platform.
