# UCS-2 (Unicode SMS)

> UCS-2 is the 16-bit encoding used when a message contains characters outside the GSM-7 alphabet; it allows 70 characters per message (67 per part), so non-Latin text costs about twice as many segments.

When a text contains any character the GSM-7 tables do not have, the handset and network switch the entire message to UCS-2, where every character takes two bytes. The 140-byte payload then holds 70 characters, or 67 per part in a concatenated message.

Scripts such as Cyrillic, Arabic, Hebrew, Devanagari, Thai, Chinese, Japanese and Korean are always UCS-2; there is no cheaper way to send them and campaigns to those countries should be planned in 70-character units. For Latin text, UCS-2 is almost always accidental: a pasted apostrophe, a bullet, an emoji.

At SMSMeteor: Unicode messages hold 70 characters (67 per part when concatenated); the composer shows the offending character and suggests a GSM-7 replacement when one exists.

Related terms: [GSM-7](https://smsmeteor.com/glossary/gsm-7), [SMS segment](https://smsmeteor.com/glossary/segment), [Emoji in SMS](https://smsmeteor.com/glossary/emoji-in-sms), [Concatenated SMS](https://smsmeteor.com/glossary/concatenated-sms)

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Source: https://smsmeteor.com/glossary/ucs-2 (HTML). Generated by SMSMeteor from the same data as the page. Summary of the whole site: https://smsmeteor.com/llms.txt