Plane

Encoding & Standards

A group of 65,536 consecutive Unicode code points. Plane 0 is the Basic Multilingual Plane (BMP); most emoji live in Plane 1 (SMP).

Unicode divides its 1,114,112 code points into 17 planes of 65,536 code points each (Planes 0 through 16). The first plane, Plane 0 (U+0000 to U+FFFF), is the Basic Multilingual Plane (BMP) containing most common scripts.

Plane 1 (U+10000 to U+1FFFF) is the Supplementary Multilingual Plane (SMP), where most emoji are allocated. Planes 2 and beyond contain supplementary CJK characters and reserved space.

The BMP/SMP distinction matters because characters in the BMP can be represented with a single UTF-16 code unit, while SMP characters (including emoji) require surrogate pairs.

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 😀). Supplementary Multilingual Plane (SMP) Supplementary Multilingual Plane (SMP)
Unicode Plane 1 (U+10000 to U+1FFFF), where the majority of emoji code points are allocated. Surrogate Pair Surrogate Pair
Two UTF-16 code units (a high surrogate U+D800-U+DBFF followed by a low surrogate U+DC00-U+DFFF) that together represent a character above U+FFFF.

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🔢 Unicode Lookup Unicode Lookup
Enter a codepoint like U+1F600 and get the emoji, encoding details, UTF-8/16 bytes, and HTML entities.

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