Unicode

A set of standards intended to allow representation of every character in each of the world's languages; usually understood to mean the 16-bit variant.

Sixteen-bit Unicode allows for up to 2¹⁶, or 65,536 characters, each of which may have a unique representation. It accommodates numerous non-English character sets and symbols, and is therefore an aid to development of products with multilingual user interfaces. Sixteen bits are not enough, however, to represent all the several hundred thousand Asian ideograms. Other 32-bit variants are available for these, but the increased inefficiency in representation of Western text inherent in them has been a barrier to widespread adoption.

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