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Unicode, 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 Standard includes letters, digits, diacritics, punctuation marks, and technical symbols for all the world’s principal written languages, as well as emoji and other symbols, using a uniform encoding scheme. The standard is maintained by the Unicode Consortium. The first version of Unicode was introduced in 1991; the most recent version contains more than 100,000 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.

The Editors of Encyclopaedia BritannicaThis article was most recently revised and updated by Erik Gregersen.