twobytepercharacter
Twobytepercharacter is a term used to describe an encoding scheme that assigns exactly two bytes to each character. This fixed-width approach simplifies memory layout and indexing, since every character occupies the same amount of space. In practice, the most widely cited realization of this concept is UCS-2, an early Unicode encoding that stores each code point in 16 bits.
UCS-2 covers only the Basic Multilingual Plane, from U+0000 to U+FFFF, and therefore cannot represent characters
Endianness affects two-byte encodings: the same two-byte value can represent different code points depending on whether
Usage today is largely limited to legacy software and systems that need fixed-width, two-byte character fields
Related topics include Unicode, UCS-2, UTF-16, surrogate pairs, and endianness.