Factoid of the day: the 140-char limit originates from the SS7 MAP signalling protocol used for SMS, which allows a message payload of precisely 140 bytes. htt

Factoid of the day: the 140-char limit originates from the SS7 MAP signalling protocol used for SMS, which allows a message payload of precisely 140 bytes. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SMS https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SMS You can actually cram up to 160 characters into an SMS if you use a 7-bit character set, but Twitter apparently wanted to support European languages and went with the 8-bit version. However, allowing 140 double-byte chars (Chinese etc) blows through the actual limit of 80, requiring concatenated SMS to send.