Tom Scott: Tom's Language Files

Why You Can Tweet More In Japanese: What Counts As A Character? (1x11)

Air date: Dec 17, 2013

Twitter was set up to support 140 characters. And in the English alphabet, that's easy to understand: a character is a letter, number, space or punctuation mark. People more or less agree with computers there. And if it was twenty years ago, that's exactly how the system would work. That far, no further.