Technology & Internet • Character encoding

Unicode

Unicode is a universal character encoding standard for representing text used by computers and digital systems.

By Ethan Anderson| Reviewed by Olivia Bennett, Standards & Fact-Checking Lead| Updated July 26, 2026|2 min read| Fact-checked

Unicode is a universal character encoding standard for representing text used by computers and digital systems. It supports many modern, historical, and technical languages, as well as symbols, emoji, and other characters. The standard is maintained by the Unicode Consortium and is used in Canadian software, publishing, government systems, and web content to support English, French, Indigenous language materials, and multilingual digital text.

Definition

Unicode is a universal character encoding standard used to represent text in computers and other digital systems. It was created to provide a consistent way to encode multilingual plain text and support text interchange across platforms.

Structure

Unicode assigns code points within a range from U+0000 to U+10FFFF. These code points are organized into 17 planes, and each plane is further subdivided into blocks with related characters.

Character coverage

The standard covers characters used in many writing systems, along with mathematical symbols, technical symbols, punctuation, musical symbols, and emoji. Its repertoire is expanded through regular version updates.

Encoding forms and data

Unicode characters can be stored and transmitted using UTF-8, UTF-16, or UTF-32. The Unicode Character Database provides machine-readable data describing character properties, classifications, and related information.

Key facts

Unicode is intended for worldwide text interchange, processing, and display across many languages and disciplines.
The Unicode code space runs from U+0000 to U+10FFFF and is divided into 17 planes.
Unicode can be encoded in UTF-8, UTF-16, or UTF-32.
The Unicode Character Database publishes character properties and related data files.

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Canadian context

Unicode is used in Canadian software, publishing, government systems, and web content to support English, French, Indigenous language materials, and multilingual digital text.

Frequently asked questions

What is Unicode?

Unicode is a universal character encoding standard that assigns code points to characters and symbols so text can be represented consistently across computer systems.

How is Unicode different from UTF-8?

Unicode is the standard; UTF-8 is one encoding form used to represent Unicode text in bytes. UTF-16 and UTF-32 are other encoding forms.

How many characters does Unicode support?

The code space supports up to 1,114,112 code points from U+0000 to U+10FFFF, though the number of assigned characters changes with each version.

What kinds of characters are included in Unicode?

Unicode includes scripts, punctuation, symbols, mathematical and technical characters, emoji, and other written-text elements.

What is the Unicode Character Database?

It is a set of data files that list Unicode character properties and related data for use in software and text processing.

Is Unicode the same as ASCII?

No. ASCII is a much smaller character set, while Unicode is a far larger standard designed to cover many writing systems and symbol sets.

References

Unicode Consortium — https://www.unicode.org/standard/standard.html
Supports: Definition and purpose of Unicode as a universal character encoding standard.
Microsoft — https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/globalization/encoding/unicode-standard
Supports: Code space, planes, encoding forms, variation sequences, and character coverage.
Unicode Consortium — https://www.unicode.org/ucd/
Supports: Unicode Character Database description.
Unicode Consortium — https://www.unicode.org/charts/
Supports: Unicode charts and version 17.0 character code charts.
Wikipedia — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode
Supports: General overview including use across the internet and plane structure.