BabelStone : How many Unicode characters are there ?

The short answer is 143,859.

The long answer is it all depends on what you mean by a "Unicode character". The Unicode Standard version 13.0 (released 10 March 2020) defines 143,859 encoded characters with unique identifying names mapped to immutable code points. However, these characters do not always correspond to user-perceived characters, as many user-perceived characters are represented in Unicode as a sequence of two or more encoded characters (and conversely, some single encoded characters may look like two or more distinct characters). For example, lowercase j with caron (ǰ) is represented as a single encoded character (U+01F0 LATIN SMALL LETTER J WITH CARON), but the corresponding uppercase character (J̌) is represented in Unicode as a sequence of two encoded characters (U+004A LATIN CAPITAL LETTER J + U+030C COMBINING CARON). Likewise, some emoji are encoded as single characters (e.g. U+2603 ☃ SNOWMAN), but many emoji are composed from sequences of encoded characters, in some cases arbitrarily long sequences of simple encoded emoji characters joined together with a Zero Width Joiner format character, and modified by a set of five skin tone modifier characters. Thus, a single emoji glyph representing a mixed race family of four might be represented by the eleven-character sequence <1F468 1F3FC 200D 1F469 1F3FD 200D 1F467 1F3FE 200D 1F466 1F3FF> (👨🏼‍👩🏽‍👧🏾‍👦🏿). Because the creation of characters using combining marks or as sequences of encoded characters is open-ended, it is not possible to say how many characters can be represented by Unicode. Nevertheless, this page attempts to plot the growth of the Unicode Standard since its initial release in 1991 in the tables and charts below.

Table of Unicode Data over Time

Characters removed in Unicode 1.0.1:

• 4 Cyrillic
• 2 Miscellaneous Technical

Characters removed in Unicode 1.1:

• 7 Greek and Coptic
• 1 Hebrew
• 5 Thai
• 5 Lao
• 71 Tibetan
• 33 named control characters (0000..001F and 007F) reclassified as unnamed control characters

Characters removed in Unicode 2.0:

• 6656 Hangul Syllables, replaced with 11,172 new Hangul Syllables at different code points

Notes

For historic versions of Unicode the statistics are based on the General Category of the characters at the time of encoding, and do not take into account any subsequent changes in General Category. Thus the fact that 4.0 has 139 format characters and 4.1 has 140 format characters is not due to a new format character having been added in 4.1, but rather due to the General Category of U+200B ZERO WIDTH SPACE having been changed from Zs to Cf in Unicode 4.0.1. Note that the statistics for 1.0.0 and 1.0.1 are based upon Ken Whistler's reconstructed Unicode Character Data (named characters with reconstructed general category of Cc, including 0000..001F and 007F, are counted as format characters).

To help understand what we're talking about, here are some definitions of some of the terms used in the table (see Section 2.4 of the Unicode Standard for further information).

• Block is a named range of Unicode characters. A block normally includes a set of related characters, either characters from a particular script or a set of symbols. Many scripts and sets of symbols are distributed over two or more blocks. The block count in the above table excludes the three blocks for surrogate code points: High Surrogates (D800..DB7F), High Private Use Surrogates (DB80..DBFF), and Low Surrogates (DC00..DFFF).
• Graphic characters are those characters with a General Category other than Cc, Cn, Co, Cs, Cf, Zl and Zp, that is to say ordinary visible characters (including spaces with a non-zero width).
• Format characters are those characters with a General Category of 'Cf', 'Zl' or 'Zp'. These are invisible characters defined by Unicode for a particular function. These include things like U+200D ZERO WIDTH JOINER, U+202D LEFT-TO-RIGHT OVERRIDE, interlinear annotation characters (FFF9..FFFB) and the set of Tag characters (E0001 and E0020..E007F). They work behind the scenes to do useful things like bidirectional control and character shaping.
• Control characters are those characters with a General Category of 'Cc'. These are invisible characters that perform a certain function that is defined by a protocol or standard other than Unicode (they are inherited from pre-existing 8-bit standards). They include familiar characters such as Tab, Carriage Return and Line Feed that are essential to writing Unicode (U+2028 LINE SEPARATOR and U+2029 PARAGRAPH SEPARATOR never took off as Unicode replacements for Carriage Return and/or Line Feed), as well as many characters that you should never see in plain text (the full range of control characters is 0000..001F and 007F..009F). Control characters are not assigned character names, although they do have character name aliases that refelect their original function.
• Private use characters are code points that are assigned as characters for private interchange. The Unicode Standard does not assign any semantics to these characters, and they are not assigned character names. There are three Private Use Areas: E000..F8FF (6,400 characters); F0000..FFFFF (65,534 characters); and 100000..10FFFF (65,534 characters).
• Noncharacters are code points that are permanently reserved, and are guaranteed never to be assigned as characters. They are the thirty-four code points ending in (X)XXFE and (X)XXFF, as well as the thirty-two code points in the range FDD0..FDEF.
• Surrogate code points are a set of 2,048 code points that are used in the UTF-16 encoding form to extend the Unicode code space beyond 16 bits. All Unicode characters outside the Basic Multilingual Plane (BMP) are encoded in UTF-16 as a pair of surrogate code points (a high surrogate code point in the range D800..DBFF, followed by a low surrogate code point in the range DC00..DFFF). Unpaired surrogate code points are noty valid in UTF-16, and any surrogate code point is invalid in other encoding forms such as UTF-8 and UTF-32.
• Named characters = Graphic characters + Format characters. These characters are each assigned a unique and unchangeable character name,
• Assigned characters = Named characters + Control characters + Private use characters.
• Assigned code points = Assigned characters + Noncharacters + Surrogate code points.
• Total code points = Assigned code points + Unassigned (or Reserved) code points.

Scripts

Charts

Click on a chart to see at full size.

[Last updated : 2020-03-10]

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