reserves 1,114,112 (= 220 + 216) code points, and currently assigns characters to more than 96,000 of those code points. The first 256 codes correspond with those of ISO 8859-1 , the most popular 8-bit character encoding in the Western world. As a result, the first 128 characters are also identical to ASCII .
The Unicode code space for characters is divided into 17 ''planes'', each with 65,536 (= 216) code points, although currently only a few planes are used:
- Plane 0: (BMP)
- Plane 1: (SMP)
- Plane 2: (SIP)
- Plane 14: (SSP)
- and '''Plane 16''', reserved for the '''Private Use Area''' (PUA)
The cap of ~220 code points exists in order to maintain compatibility with the UTF-16 encoding, which addresses only that range (see below). Currently, about ten percent of the Unicode code space is used. Furthermore, ranges of characters have been tentatively blocked out for every known unencoded script (see {Link without Title} ), and while Unicode may need another plane for ideographic characters, there are ten planes available if previously unknown scripts with tens of thousands of characters are discovered. This ~20 bit limit is unlikely to be reached in the near future.
The first plane (plane 0), the ''Basic Multilingual Plane'' (BMP), is where most characters have been assigned so far. The BMP contains characters for almost all modern languages, and a large number of special characters. Most of the allocated code points in the BMP are used to encode Chinese, Japanese, and Korean ( CJK ) characters.
The graphic on the right is a visual roadmap to the Basic Multilingual Plane. The colours in use are:
- Black = Latin scripts and symbols
- Light Blue = Linguistic scripts
- Blue = Other European scripts
- Orange = Middle Eastern and SW Asian scripts
- Light Orange = African scripts
- Green = South Asian scripts
- Purple = Southeast Asian scripts
- Red = East Asian scripts
- Light Red = Unified CJK Han
- Yellow = Aboriginal scripts
- Magenta = Symbols
- Dark Grey = Diacritic s
- Light Grey = UTF-16 surrogates and private use
- Cyan = Miscellaneous characters
- White = Unused
As Of Unicode 4.1 , The BMP includes the following scripts:
- Basic Latin (0000–007F)
- Latin-1 Supplement (0080–00FF)
- Latin Extended-A (0100–017F)
- Latin Extended-B (0180–024F)
- IPA Extensions (0250–02AF)
- Spacing Modifier Letters (02B0–02FF)
- Combining Diacritical Marks (0300–036F)
- Greek and Coptic (0370–03FF)
- Cyrillic (0400–04FF)
- Cyrillic Supplement (0500–052F)
- Armenian (0530–058F)
- Hebrew (0590–05FF)
- Arabic (0600–06FF)
- Syriac (0700–074F)
- Arabic Supplement (0750–077F)
- Thaana (0780–07BF)
- Indic scripts:
- --- Devanagari (0900–097F)
- --- Bengali (0980–09FF)
- --- Gurmukhi (0A00–0A7F)
- --- Gujarati (0A80–0AFF)
- --- Oriya (0B00–0B7F)
- --- Tamil (0B80–0BFF)
- --- Telugu (0C00–0C7F)
- --- Kannada (0C80–0CFF)
- --- Malayalam (0D00–0D7F)
- --- Sinhala (0D80–0DFF)
- Thai (0E00–0E7F)
- Lao (0E80–0EFF)
- Tibetan (0F00–0FFF)
- Burmese (1000–109F)
- Georgian (10A0–10FF)
- Hangul Jamo (1100–11FF)
- Ethiopic (1200–137F)
- Ethiopic Supplement (1380–139F)
- Cherokee (13A0–13FF)
- Unified Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics (1400–167F)
- Ogham (1680–169F)
- Runic (16A0–16FF)
- Filipino scripts:
- --- Tagalog (1700–171F)
- --- Hanunóo (1720–173F)
- --- Buhid (1740–175F)
- --- Tagbanwa (1760–177F)
- Khmer (1780–17FF)
- Mongolian (1800–18AF)
- Limbu (1900–194F)
- Tai Le (1950–197F)
- New Tai Lue (1980–19DF)
- Khmer Symbols (19E0–19FF)
- Buginese (1A00–1A1F)
- Phonetic Extensions (1D00–1D7F)
- Phonetic Extensions Supplement (1D80–1DBF)
- Combining Diacritical Marks Supplement (1DC0–1DFF)
- Latin Extended Additional (1E00–1EFF)
- Greek Extended (1F00–1FFF)
- Symbols:
- --- General Punctuation (2000–206F)
- --- Superscripts and Subscripts (2070–209F)
- --- Currency Symbol s (20A0–20CF)
- --- Combining Diacritical Marks for Symbols (20D0–20FF)
- --- Letterlike Symbols (2100–214F)
- --- Number Forms (2150–218F)
- --- Arrows (2190–21FF)
- --- Mathematical Operators (2200–22FF)
- --- Miscellaneous Technical (2300–23FF)
- --- Control Pictures (2400–243F)
- --- Optical Character Recognition (2440–245F)
- --- Enclosed Alphanumerics (2460–24FF)
- --- Box Drawing (2500–257F)
- --- Block Elements (2580–259F)
- --- Geometric Shapes (25A0–25FF)
- --- Miscellaneous Symbols (2600–26FF)
- --- Dingbats (2700–27BF)
- --- Miscellaneous Mathematical Symbols-A (27C0–27EF)
- --- Supplemental Arrows-A (27F0–27FF)
- --- Braille Patterns (2800–28FF)
- --- Supplemental Arrows-B (2900–297F)
- --- Miscellaneous Mathematical Symbols-B (2980–29FF)
- --- Supplemental Mathematical Operators (2A00–2AFF)
- --- Miscellaneous Symbols and Arrows (2B00–2BFF)
- Glagolitic (2C00–2C5F)
- Coptic (2C80–2CFF)
- Georgian Supplement (2D00–2D2F)
- Tifinagh (2D30–2D7F)
- Ethiopic Extended (2D80–2DDF)
- Supplemental Punctuation (2E00–2E7F)
- CJK Radical s Supplement (2E80–2EFF)
- Kangxi Radical s (2F00–2FDF)
- Ideographic Description Characters (2FF0–2FFF)
- CJK Symbols and Punctuation (3000–303F)
- Hiragana (3040–309F)
- Katakana (30A0–30FF)
- Bopomofo (3100–312F)
- Hangul Compatibility Jamo (3130–318F)
- Kanbun (3190–319F)
- Bopomofo Extended (31A0–31BF)
- CJK Strokes (31C0–31EF)
- Katakana Phonetic Extensions (31F0–31FF)
- Enclosed CJK Letters and Months (3200–32FF)
- CJK Compatibility (3300–33FF)
- CJK Unified Ideographs Extension A (3400–4DBF)
- Yijing Hexagram Symbols (4DC0–4DFF)
- CJK Unified Ideographs (4E00–9FFF), also see Han Unification
- Yi Syllables (A000–A48F)
- Yi Radicals (A490–A4CF)
- Modifier Tone Letters (A700–A71F)
- Syloti Nagri (A800–A82F)
- Hangul Syllables (AC00–D7AF)
- High Surrogates (D800–DB7F)
- High Private Use Surrogates (DB80–DBFF)
- Low Surrogates (DC00–DFFF)
- Private Use Area (E000–F8FF)
- CJK Compatibility Ideograph s (F900–FAFF)
- Alphabetic Presentation Form s (FB00–FB4F)
- Arabic Presentation Forms-A (FB50–FDFF)
- Variation Selectors (FE00–FE0F)
- Vertical Forms (FE10–FE1F)
- Combining Half Marks (FE20–FE2F)
- CJK Compatibility Forms (FE30–FE4F)
- Small Form Variants (FE50–FE6F)
- Arabic Presentation Forms-B (FE70–FEFF)
- Halfwidth and Fullwidth Forms (FF00–FFEF)
- Specials (FFF0–FFFF)
Several scripts are expected to be included in the BMP in the next revision of Unicode. These scripts, and their proposed code point ranges, are the following:
Several other scripts are proposed for inclusion in the BMP, including:
Plane 1, the ''Supplementary Multilingual Plane'' (SMP), is mostly used for historic scripts such as Linear B , but is also used for musical and mathematical symbols.
As Of Unicode 4.1 , Plane One includes the following scripts:
- Linear B Syllabary (10000–1007F)
- Linear B Ideograms (10080–100FF)
- Aegean Numbers (10100–1013F)
- Ancient Greek Numbers (10140–1018F)
- Old Italic (10300–1032F)
- Gothic (10330–1034F)
- Ugaritic (10380–1039F)
- Old Persian (103A0–103DF)
- Deseret (10400–1044F)
- Shavian (10450–1047F)
- Osmanya (10480–104AF)
- Cypriot Syllabary (10800–1083F)
- Kharoshthi (10A00–10A5F)
- Byzantine Musical Symbols (1D000–1D0FF)
- Musical Symbols (1D100–1D1FF)
- Ancient Greek Musical Notation (1D200–1D24F)
- Tai Xuan Jing Symbols (1D300–1D35F)
- Mathematical Alphanumeric Symbols (1D400–1D7FF)
Several scripts are expected to be included in the next revision of Unicode:
Many other scripts are proposed for inclusion in Plane One, including:
A ''Private Use Area'' (PUA) is one of several ranges which are reserved for private use. For this range, the Unicode standard does not specify any characters.
The Basic Multilingual Plane includes a PUA in the range from U+E000 to U+F8FF (57344–63743). ''Plane Fifteen'' (U+F0000 to U+FFFFF), and ''Plane Sixteen'' (U+100000 to 10FFFF) are completely reserved for private use as well.
The use of the PUA was a concept inherited from certain Asian encoding systems. These systems had private use areas to encode Japanese Gaiji (rare personal name characters) in application-specific ways. Similarly the ConScript Unicode Registry aims to coordinate the mapping of scripts not yet encoded in or rejected by Unicode in the PUAs. The Medieval Unicode Font Initiative uses the PUA to encode various ligatures, Precomposed Character s, and symbols found in medieval texts.
One example of usage of the Private Use Area is Apple Computer 's usage of U+F8FF for The Apple Logo .
Plane 2, the ''Supplementary Ideographic Plane'' (SIP), is used for about 40,000 rare Chinese Character s that are mostly historic, although there are some modern ones. Plane 14 (''E'' in Hexadecimal ), the ''Supplementary Special-purpose Plane'' (SSP), currently contains some non-recommended language tag characters and some variation selection characters.
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