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Unicode Planes

The Unicode standard arranges the characters in 17 so-called planes of a bit more than 65,000 codepoints (216 to be precise) each. It has thus theoretically place for 1,114,112 characters. Some planes are still undefined and will be filled at a later date. The most common characters live in the almost full Basic Multilingual Plane.

The second plane contains mostly ancient characters, like Egyptian Hieroglyphs, and graphic symbols, for example Mahjongg tiles or emoticons. Thirdly the Supplementary Ideographic Plane hosts lots of East Asian characters, that didn’t find a place in the Basic Multilingual Plane. The third-to-last Supplementary Special Purpose Plane is almost completely empty and planned to contain non-character codepoints, like control characters, that define the language of a text. The last two planes are special purpose planes. Codepoints defined there are private, that is, they will never be specified by Unicode and can be freely assigned by third-party programs to whatever seems useful.

  1. U+0000 to U+FFFF Basic Multilingual Plane
  2. U+10000 to U+1FFFF Supplementary Multilingual Plane
  3. U+20000 to U+2FFFF Supplementary Ideographic Plane
  4. U+30000 to U+3FFFF Tertiary Ideographic Plane
  5. U+40000 to U+4FFFF Plane 5 (unassigned)
  6. U+50000 to U+5FFFF Plane 6 (unassigned)
  7. U+60000 to U+6FFFF Plane 7 (unassigned)
  8. U+70000 to U+7FFFF Plane 8 (unassigned)
  9. U+80000 to U+8FFFF Plane 9 (unassigned)
  10. U+90000 to U+9FFFF Plane 10 (unassigned)
  11. U+A0000 to U+AFFFF Plane 11 (unassigned)
  12. U+B0000 to U+BFFFF Plane 12 (unassigned)
  13. U+C0000 to U+CFFFF Plane 13 (unassigned)
  14. U+D0000 to U+DFFFF Plane 14 (unassigned)
  15. U+E0000 to U+EFFFF Supplementary Special-purpose Plane
  16. U+F0000 to U+FFFFF Supplementary Private Use Area - A
  17. U+100000 to U+10FFFF Supplementary Private Use Area - B