unicodes

Unicodes is not a standard term; in practice, the correct term is Unicode. When people refer to “Unicodes,” they may mean individual Unicode code points or the set of characters encoded by the Unicode Standard. Unicode is a universal character encoding system that assigns a unique code point to each character or symbol used in writing systems, technical notation, punctuation, and symbols.

A code point is an abstract numeric value, written in the form U+XXXX. The Unicode code space ranges from U+0000 to U+10FFFF and is organized into 17 planes, with the Basic Multilingual Plane containing many common characters. Some code points are reserved or noncharacters, and a few are designated for private use.

In practice, Unicode characters are stored in computers using encodings such as UTF-8, UTF-16, or UTF-32. UTF-8 is variable-length and ASCII-compatible, widely used on the web. UTF-16 uses 2 or 4 bytes via surrogate pairs, while UTF-32 uses a fixed 4-byte unit. The choice of encoding affects storage efficiency and processing.

Unicode also defines character properties, normalization forms (NFC, NFD, NFKC, NFKD) to enable canonical equivalence, and rules for text rendering, including bidirectional layout for complex scripts. It includes a broad set of symbols, emoji sequences, and modifiers.

Governance and development are overseen by the Unicode Consortium, which coordinates updates, new characters, and compatibility with ISO/IEC 10646, the international standard it aligns with. The term “Unicode” thus refers to the standard and its encoded repertoire, while “Unicodes” is an uncommon and imprecise plural form.