What is Unicode? A practical explainer
Unicode is the universal catalogue that gives every character — letters, symbols and emoji — a unique number, so text looks the same on every device.
Code points
Every character gets a code point written like U+0041 (the letter A) or U+1F525 (🔥). Unicode 15 defines over 149,000 of them.
Encodings: UTF-8, UTF-16
A code point is abstract; an encoding turns it into bytes. UTF-8 is the web’s default — ASCII stays one byte, while emoji take four.
Why emoji sometimes show as boxes
Your device needs a font that includes the character. New emoji (like 🫠) appear as ☐ on systems whose fonts predate them.
Open in editor