Twitter doubles iconic 140-character limit for 'nearly' everyone

Twitter says it's ending its iconic 140-character limit — and giving nearly everyone 280 characters.

Users tweeting in Chinese, Japanese and Korean will still have the original limit. That's because writing in those languages uses fewer characters.

The company says 9 percent of tweets written in English hit the 140-character limit. This causes people to spend more time editing their tweets or not sending them out at all. Twitter hopes that the expanded limit will get more people tweeting more, helping its lackluster user growth. Twitter has been testing the new limit for weeks and is starting to roll it out Tuesday.

The company has been slowly easing restrictions to let people cram more characters into a tweet. It stopped counting polls, photos, videos and other things toward the limit.