What is Unicode? We explain the global encoding system

The Unicode Consortium has been around since 1991, which means it has been around since the dawn of the digital era Accordingly, Unicode is well established to this day. Our guide explains what it is actually about.

Uniform, worldwide, clear: Unicode includes all existing text characters and symbols.

Thanks to Unicode, there is a clearly defined code for every text character and symbol.

What is Unicode and what does it mean?

Unicode is an international standard for digital codes:

• Each character is assigned a code individually. In this way, all characters are clearly defined by Unicode.
• Analogous to this and identical in content is the ISO 10646. The coding included there is Universal Coded Character Set (UCS).
• Since the Unicode database is already very large and continues to grow, the documents are divided into categories. This is the Basic Multilingual Plane (BMP), in which, for example, the groups 00, 01 and 02 contain all Latin fonts and symbols. Thus, the code "U+0041" stands for the "A", "A+0061" for "a" and "U+0039" for the "9".

Summarized: Thanks to Unicode, all the symbols and text characters used in this world are contained uniformly in one coding system. Dies ermöglicht den Austausch von Informationen grenzübergreifend ohne technische Hürden.