 Logo of the Unicode Consortium | |
| Alias(es) |
|
|---|---|
| Language(s) | 168 scripts (list) |
| Standard | Unicode Standard |
| Encoding formats | (uncommon) (obsolete) |
| Preceded by | ISO/IEC 8859, among others |
Unicode, formally The Unicode Standard,[note 1] is a text encoding standard maintained by the Unicode Consortium designed to support the use of text in all of the world's writing systems that can be digitized. Version 16.0 of the standard[A] defines 154998 characters and 168 scripts[3] used in various ordinary, literary, academic, and technical contexts.
Many common characters, including numerals, punctuation, and other symbols, are unified within the standard and are not treated as specific to any given writing system. Unicode encodes 3790 emoji, with the continued development thereof conducted by the Consortium as a part of the standard.[4] Moreover, the widespread adoption of Unicode was in large part responsible for the initial popularization of emoji outside of Japan. Unicode is ultimately capable of encoding more than 1.1 million characters.
Unicode has largely supplanted the previous environment of a myriad of incompatible character sets, each used within different locales and on different computer architectures. Unicode is used to encode the vast majority of text on the Internet, including most web pages, and relevant Unicode support has become a common consideration in contemporary software development.
The Unicode character repertoire is synchronized with ISO/IEC 10646, each being code-for-code identical with one another. However, The Unicode Standard is more than just a repertoire within which characters are assigned. To aid developers and designers, the standard also provides charts and reference data, as well as annexes explaining concepts germane to various scripts, providing guidance for their implementation. Topics covered by these annexes include character normalization, character composition and decomposition, collation, and directionality.[5]
Unicode text is processed and stored as binary data using one of several encodings, which define how to translate the standard's abstracted codes for characters into sequences of bytes. The Unicode Standard itself defines three encodings: UTF-8, UTF-16, and UTF-32, though several others exist. Of these, UTF-8 is the most widely used by a large margin, in part due to its backwards-compatibility with ASCII.
- ^ "Unicode Technical Report #28: Unicode 3.2". Unicode Consortium. 2002-03-27. Retrieved 2022-06-23.
- ^ Jenkins, John H. (2021-08-26). "Unicode Standard Annex #45: U-source Ideographs". Unicode Consortium. §2.2 The Source Field. Retrieved 2022-06-23.
- ^
- "Unicode Character Count V16.0". The Unicode Consortium. 2024-09-10.
- "Unicode 16.0 Versioned Charts Index". The Unicode Consortium. 2024-09-10.
- "Supported Scripts". The Unicode Consortium. 2024-09-10. Retrieved 2024-09-11.
- ^ "Emoji Counts, v16.0". The Unicode Consortium. Retrieved 2024-09-10.
- ^ "The Unicode Standard: A Technical Introduction". 2019-08-22. Retrieved 2024-09-11.
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