For X (formerly Twitter) newbies, figuring out how to properly respond to people, use hashtags, and have conversations can be a challenge. Much of the confusion stems from the amount of jargon that litters the popular social network. Over the years, the folks at X have worked to demystify that jargon, but for many users, that still may not be enough.

We've put together a beginner's course in basic X-hose so you can understand the most basic functions.

When Twitter launched in 2006, there was no retweet button, just a group of users trying to cram as much of an update as possible into 140 characters. The choice of 140 characters came about because Twitter was initially based on mobile text messaging, and 140 characters was the limit at the time.

Those restrictions eventually inspired the community-generated RT (retweet), the MT (modified tweet), hashtags (#), quote tweets, and several other shortenings. In 2017, Twitter doubled the number of allowed characters to 280.