Unicode

Universal character encoding standard that assigns a unique number to every character across all writing systems and symbol sets, including emoji.

Unicode is the foundation of modern text computing. Before Unicode, competing encoding standards (ASCII, ISO 8859, Shift JIS, etc.) made international text exchange error-prone. Unicode provides a single, consistent mapping from numbers to characters.

The standard defines over 154,000 characters spanning 168 scripts. Emoji are allocated primarily in the Supplementary Multilingual Plane (Plane 1), starting around U+1F600. The Unicode Consortium releases new versions annually, each potentially adding new emoji.

Unicode only defines *what* each code point means — the actual byte representation depends on the encoding form used (UTF-8, UTF-16, or UTF-32).