Unicode

Synonyms

ISO/IEC 10646: The Universal Character Set

Glossary

Character:

an abstraction that represents a symbol used to construct words in a written language

Code point:

a number used to uniquely identify a character

Encoding:

a mapping from code points to a sequence of bits

Glyph:

an abstract symbol that can be rendered at multiple sizes and resolutions in order to represent a character visually to people

Definition

Unicode (The Unicode Consortium 2016a) is an industry standard for representing text characters that is designed to facilitate internationalization and localization of software systems. The Unicode effort was initiated because previous attempts at defining a universal text encoding had important limitations that limited their scope or made their encoding complicated. Unicode supports the scripts of almost all languages in active use plus some important historical languages and even imaginary scripts invented for scholarly and artistic reasons. Unicode has a flexible...