As of Unicode version 16.0, there are 155,063 characters with code points, covering 168 modern and historical scripts, as well as multiple symbol sets. This article includes the 1,062 characters in the Multilingual European Character Set 2 (MES-2) subset, and some additional related characters.

Character reference overview

HTML and XML provide ways to reference Unicode characters when the characters themselves either cannot or should not be used. A numeric character reference refers to a character by its Universal Character Set/Unicode code point, and a character entity reference refers to a character by a predefined name. A numeric character reference uses the format or where nnnn is the code point in decimal form, and hhhh is the code point in hexadecimal form. The x must be lowercase in XML documents. The nnnn or hhhh may be any number of digits and may include leading zeros. The hhhh may mix uppercase and lowercase, though uppercase is the usual style. In contrast, a character entity reference refers to a character by the name of an entity which has the desired character as its replacement text. The entity must either be predefined (built into the markup language) or explicitly declared in a Document Type Definition (DTD). The format is the same as for any entity reference: where name is the case-sensitive name of the entity. The semicolon is required. Because numbers are harder for humans to remember than names, character entity references are most often written by humans, while numeric character references are most often produced by computer programs.

Control codes

65 characters, including DEL. All belong to the common script. Footnotes:

Latin script

The Unicode Standard (version ) classifies 1,487 characters as belonging to the Latin script.

Basic Latin

95 characters; the 52 alphabet characters belong to the Latin script. The remaining 43 belong to the common script. The 33 characters classified as ASCII Punctuation & Symbols are also sometimes referred to as ASCII special characters. Often only these characters (and not other Unicode punctuation) are what is meant when an organization says a password "requires punctuation marks".

Latin-1 Supplement

96 characters; the 62 letters, and two ordinal indicators belong to the Latin script. The remaining 32 belong to the common script.

Latin Extended-A

128 characters; all belong to the Latin script.

Latin Extended-B

208 characters; all belong to the Latin script; 33 in the MES-2 subset.

Latin Extended Additional

256 characters; all belong to the Latin script; 23 in the MES-2 subset.

Additional Latin Extended

Phonetic scripts

IPA Extensions

96 characters; all belong to the Latin script; three in the MES-2 subset.

Spacing modifier letters

80 characters; 15 in the MES-2 subset.

Phonetic Extensions

Combining marks

Greek and Coptic

144 code points; 135 assigned characters; 85 in the MES-2 subset.

Greek Extended

For polytonic orthography. 256 code points; 233 assigned characters, all in the MES-2 subset (#670 – 902).

Cyrillic

256 characters; 191 in the MES-2 subset.

Cyrillic supplements

Armenian

Semitic languages

Arabic

Hebrew

Syriac

Mandaic

Samaritan

Thaana

Brahmic (Indic) scripts

The range from U+0900 to U+0DFF includes Devanagari, Bengali script, Gurmukhi, Gujarati script, Odia alphabet, Tamil script, Telugu script, Kannada script, Malayalam script, and Sinhala script.

Devanagari

Bengali and Assamese

Gurmukhi

Gujarati

Oriya

Tamil

Telugu

Kannada

Malayalam

Sinhala

Other Brahmic scripts

Other Brahmic and Indic scripts in Unicode include:

Other South and Central Asian writing systems

Southeast Asian writing systems

Georgian

African scripts

Ge'ez/Ethiopic script

Other African scripts

American scripts

Unified Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics

Other American scripts

Mongolian

Unicode symbols

General Punctuation

112 code points; 111 assigned characters; 24 in the MES-2 subset.

Superscripts and Subscripts

Currency Symbols

Letterlike Symbols

Number Forms

Arrows

Mathematical symbols

Miscellaneous Technical

Control Pictures

Optical Character Recognition

Enclosed Alphanumerics

Box Drawing

Block Elements

Geometric Shapes

Symbols for Legacy Computing

Symbols for Legacy Computing Supplement

Miscellaneous Symbols

Dingbats

East Asian writing systems

CJK Symbols and Punctuation

Hiragana

Katakana

Bopomofo

Hangul Jamo and Compatibility Jamo

Kanbun

Enclosed CJK Letters and Months

CJK Compatibility

CJK Compatibility Forms

CJK Unified Ideographs

CJK Radicals

Other East Asian writing systems

Alphabetic Presentation Forms

Ancient and historic scripts

Shavian

Notational systems

Braille

Music

Shorthand

Sutton SignWriting

Emoji

Alchemical symbols

Game symbols

Mahjong Tiles

Domino Tiles

Playing Cards

Chess Symbols

Special areas and format characters