Unicode Characters

Unicode is the standard that assigns every character in every writing system in active use — and plenty no longer in use — a unique number, its code point, written as U+ followed by hex digits. The current standard defines over 149,000 characters across scripts, symbols and emoji, organised into contiguous ranges called blocks.

This browser lets you step through those blocks one at a time rather than searching blind, and click any character to copy it straight to the clipboard as plain Unicode text.

Blocks worth knowing

Why boxes show up instead of characters

Unicode defines that a code point exists and what it means, but it does not supply the artwork — that is the font's job. A font only draws glyphs for the ranges its designer covered, so a code point outside that coverage renders as a placeholder box, often with the hex code printed inside it. The character itself is completely valid: it copies and pastes correctly, and will display properly the moment it lands somewhere with a font that covers it.

Unicode vs UTF-8 vs ASCII

Unicode is the character set — the list of what every code point means. UTF-8 is one way of encoding those code points as bytes for storage or transmission, and it is by far the dominant encoding on the modern web because it stays backward-compatible with plain ASCII for the first 128 characters. ASCII itself is much older and much smaller, covering only 128 characters — no accents, no non-Latin scripts, no emoji — which is exactly the limitation Unicode was created to remove.