See Also: Unicode(encyclopedia)

Unicode (sh)




International character-encoding system designed to support the electronic interchange, processing, and display of the written texts of the diverse languages of the modern and classical world.

The Unicode Worldwide Character Standard includes letters, digits, diacritics, punctuation marks, and technical symbols for all the world's principal written languages, using a uniform encoding scheme. The first version of Unicode was introduced in 1991; the most recent version contains almost 50,000 characters. Numerous encoding systems (including ASCII) predate Unicode. With Unicode (unlike earlier systems), the unique number provided for each character remains the same on any system that supports Unicode.