Unicode

Technical/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).

Related Terms

Code Point Code Point
A unique numerical value assigned to each character in the Unicode standard, written in the format U+XXXX (e.g., U+1F600 for 😀). Emoji Emoji
A Japanese word (絵文字) meaning 'picture character' — small graphical symbols used in digital communication to express ideas, emotions, and objects. ICU (ICU) ICU (ICU)
International Components for Unicode — a widely-used open-source library providing Unicode and internationalization support, including emoji processing. Unicode Standard Unicode Standard
The complete character encoding system maintained by the Unicode Consortium, defining characters, properties, algorithms, and encoding forms.

Related Tools

🔢 Unicode Lookup Unicode Lookup
Enter a codepoint like U+1F600 and get the emoji, encoding details, UTF-8/16 bytes, and HTML entities. 🔍 Sequence Analyzer Sequence Analyzer
Decode ZWJ sequences, skin tone modifiers, keycap sequences, and flag pairs into individual components.

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