TL;DR
70 original WhatsApp About lines in Hindi and roman, every one inside the 139-character limit — most of them under 45, because that is where the field actually looks right. And the distinction almost nobody makes: About is permanent and seen by everyone in your contact list, Status vanishes in 24 hours. Those two facts mean they need genuinely different lines. Tap any line to copy.
About is permanent. Status is not.
These are the two most-confused fields on the most-used app in India, so:
Status is a post. It sits in the Updates tab, it expires after 24 hours, and people go looking for it. It is the right place for a mood, a joke, a photo, a line you will not stand behind next week.
About is the line under your name inside the chat screen. It does not expire. Your boss sees it. Your landlord sees it. The person you interviewed with last month sees it. Nobody is notified when it changes, so nobody reads it now — they read it whenever they happen to open your chat, which could be tonight or could be in April.
Two consequences follow, and they are the whole reason this page exists.
A good About line has to survive four months. Anything raw, pointed, or tied to this week's mood will be sitting there long after the week is over, being read by people you were not thinking about when you typed it. That is how a line meant for one person becomes something a colleague scrolls past.
A good About line is not aimed at anyone. Status can be aimed — that is its whole craft. About cannot, because its audience is literally everyone with your number.
So: put the pointed lines in Status. Put the durable ones here.
The 139-character rule
WhatsApp's About field stops at 139 characters. There is no warning and no counter that turns red — the field simply refuses further input, so a longer line just gets quietly cut where you stopped noticing.
In practice you want far less than 139. On the chat screen the About sits in small grey text under your name and gets truncated on narrower phones well before the limit. Everything below is under 60 characters, and the last section is under 25 for people who want it to look like a signature rather than a sentence.
Everyday About lines (18)
Devanagari About (14)
Devanagari in this field reads as deliberate — a line someone chose rather than a default that was left there.
Busy, without saying "busy" (12)
The most common real use of the About field: telling people your reply time is not their fault.
For a number that work also has (12)
If your personal number is on a visiting card, in a group of forty parents, or with clients — these are the lines that will not embarrass you in six months.
Under 25 characters (14)
Short enough to read as a signature rather than a sentence.
What not to leave in About
Because it stays there, three kinds of line cost more here than they would in a Status.
- Anything about one person. A line that means something only to your ex, your crush, or the friend you fought with will be read by four hundred people including that person's cousin, every day, for months.
- A mood from a bad week. Status is for the bad week. About outlives it, and a line you wrote at 2 a.m. in March is a strange thing to find under your name in September.
- A phone number or an email. Your About is visible by default to everyone, not just your contacts — check Settings, Privacy, About before you put anything there you would not put on a poster.
If what you want is the field that expires, that is Status — status shayari that fits the box covers the length rules there, and how to put shayari on your WhatsApp status is the step-by-step for actually getting a line in with a background and a font. The third surface, the one under your display picture, has its own rules again — WhatsApp DP captions in Hindi covers those.
When 139 characters is not the problem
There is a specific reason people spend twenty minutes on an About line: they are trying to say something to one person in a place that person will definitely see, without having to send it.
That is an understandable instinct and a bad plan. The line has to be vague enough for everyone, which makes it too vague for the one person, and if they do decode it correctly they still cannot answer it without admitting they decoded it.
Lovely's Things I Never Said at ₹49 is the honest version of that impulse — a scrollable drafts folder where the messages you deleted stay visible on purpose: crossed-out chat drafts, polaroids with the thought you were actually having, a real 2 AM voice memo in your own voice, and a handwritten letter with the strike-throughs left in. About twelve minutes to build, one link to send, no account on their side, and an optional password if it is meant for exactly one person.
"About is a sign you hang up," says Ganesh, Lovely's founder. "A page is a door you knock on. People keep hanging signs and hoping."
Make it yours: cut a word, add a fact
An About line does not need personalising the way a shayari does — it needs to be true and short. Two edits do most of the work:
Cut the qualifier. Main thoda kam bolta hoon becomes Kam bolta hoon. Six characters gone and the line got firmer.
Add one fact. Seekh raha hoon becomes Guitar seekh raha hoon. Now a stranger opening your chat knows one true thing about you, which is more than 95% of About lines manage.
Before: Ache logon ke liye waqt hai. After: Ache logon aur achi chai ke liye waqt hai.
Still 41 characters, still inside the limit, and now it sounds like a person instead of a proverb.
Frequently asked questions
What is the character limit for WhatsApp About?
139 characters. It is a hard limit — the field simply stops accepting input, so a long line gets silently trimmed as you type it. Every line on this page is well inside it, most of them under 45.
What is the difference between WhatsApp About and WhatsApp Status?
About is a permanent line under your name that every contact can see whenever they open your chat. Status is a post that disappears after 24 hours. They need completely different lines — About should still make sense in four months, Status only has to make sense today.
Who can see my WhatsApp About?
Whoever your privacy setting allows — by default everyone, though you can restrict it to your contacts or to nobody in Settings, Privacy, About. That default is why a personal line in About reaches a much wider audience than most people intend.
Should a WhatsApp About be in Hindi or roman?
Either works, since the field is short enough that neither script truncates. Devanagari looks more deliberate and roman reads faster; if your number is shared with work contacts, roman tends to be the safer default.
How often should I change my WhatsApp About?
Rarely, and that is the point. Nobody gets a notification when it changes, so a line that changes weekly is doing status work in the wrong field. If you want something noticed today, post a status; if you want something true in December, put it here.