Telegram username checker

What Telegram actually allows

Five rules, all enforced at the moment you save the name. Telegram's app shows the field in red without saying which one you broke.

1. 5 to 32 characters. Shorter names exist, but they were registered before the limit or sold through Telegram's own username auction. You cannot claim a 4-character name in the app.
2. Letters, digits and underscores only. No dots, no dashes, no spaces, no accented letters, no emoji. If you are copying a handle from another network, this is usually the rule that breaks it.
3. Starts with a letter. A leading digit or underscore is rejected. 2fast is out; fast2 is fine.
4. Does not end with an underscore. An underscore anywhere in the middle is fine. Last position is not.
5. No two underscores in a row. my_name works. my__name does not.

Case does not matter. Telegram treats MyName and myname as the same username, so picking a capitalisation will not rescue a name somebody already holds. Capitals only change how the name looks when you write it out.

Bots carry one extra rule: the username has to end in "bot". Everything above still applies, so weather_bot is valid and weather_Bot is the same name. This checker flags it when the name you typed would work for a bot too.

What this check can and cannot see

The availability check loads the public t.me page for the name and reads one thing: whether Telegram renders a profile there. A name in use by a person, a group, a channel or a bot has a public page with a title on it. A name nobody holds returns a bare page with nothing on it.

That makes a taken result reliable and a free result merely likely. Telegram keeps a reserve list of names it will not hand out, sells some through its username auction, and leaves nothing public behind when an account is deleted or restricted. All three look exactly like a free name from the outside.

So treat a free result as a green light to go and try it, not as a reservation. Nothing here claims a name for you, and nothing here can.

When the name is gone

Most short English words went years ago. What still works, in rough order of how well it holds up:

• Add the thing you do. anna_writes beats anna_1. A suffix that means something survives being read aloud on a call, and it tells a stranger what they are looking at before they open the chat.
• Use the underscore as a space. It is the only separator Telegram allows, and two words read faster than one long run of letters. Just not two in a row, and not at the end.
• Put a word in front, not a digit behind. A trailing number is the universal mark of someone who got there second. A prefix like the or real reads as deliberate.
• Match what you use elsewhere. If people already find you by one handle on other networks, the matching Telegram name is worth more than a cleverer one that nobody will guess.
• Say it out loud before you save it. You will read this name into a microphone more often than you expect. Anything that needs spelling letter by letter costs you every time.

The suggestions above the rules follow the first three of these. They are checked against the format rules before you see them, so none of them can be rejected for being the wrong shape.