A short, friendly tour of Unicode

Unicode assigns a number—called a code point—to every character you can type or see: letters, digits, emoji, punctuation, and entire writing systems. Think of it as a shared map for text.

Range: U+0000–U+10FFFF Over 100 scripts Emoji live here too

Quick examples

Smiling Face	`U+1F600`	😀
Heart	`U+2764`	❤
Snowflake	`U+2744`	❄
Ukrainian Flag	`U+1F1FA U+1F1E6`	🇺🇦

Tip: press Ctrl + F (or ⌘ + F) to find names or code points on this page.

How code points work

Each character has a hexadecimal identifier like U+0410 (Cyrillic capital “A”). Many characters also have combining marks—for example, an accent—so the same visual letter can be written in more than one way.

Normalization

Because of those alternate forms, software often applies normalization (NFC/NFD/NFKC/NFKD) so that strings compare consistently. If two strings look the same but won’t match, normalization is usually the fix.

Handy facts

UTF‑8 is the most common encoding on the web.
Flags are pairs of “Regional Indicator” letters.
Some emojis take modifiers (skin tone, gender).
Direction matters: scripts can be left‑to‑right or right‑to‑left.

Browse Unicode blocks

The tool below shows the list of Unicode blocks — groups of characters that belong together (Latin, Cyrillic, Greek, Emoji, and many more).