Abstract. Given a p.i. algebra A, we study which partitions λ correspond to characters with non-zero multiplicities in the cocharacter sequence of A. We define the ω 0 (A), the eventual arm width to be the maximal d so that such λ can have d parts arbitrarily large, and ω 1 (A) to be the maximum h so that the conjugate λ could have h arbitrarily large parts. Our main result is that for any A, ω 0 (A) ≥ ω 1 (A).