Unicode
Definition of Unicode
Unicode assigns a unique code point (U+0000 through U+10FFFF) to every character in every writing system - currently over 149,000 characters across 161 scripts as of version 16.0 (September 2024). It solved the fundamental problem with code pages: a single document can now contain Arabic, Chinese, Latin, emoji, and mathematical symbols without switching encodings.
Unicode is the character set. UTF-8, UTF-16, and UTF-32 are encodings that serialize Unicode code points into bytes. UTF-8 dominates the web (98%+ of pages). The first 128 Unicode code points are identical to ASCII, making ASCII a strict subset. Convert between Unicode and ASCII with our Unicode-to-ASCII tool, or explore how individual characters map across encodings on our ASCII table.
Unicode is the character set. UTF-8, UTF-16, and UTF-32 are encodings that serialize Unicode code points into bytes. UTF-8 dominates the web (98%+ of pages). The first 128 Unicode code points are identical to ASCII, making ASCII a strict subset. Convert between Unicode and ASCII with our Unicode-to-ASCII tool, or explore how individual characters map across encodings on our ASCII table.