BabelStone Blog

Thursday, 24 November 2005

How many Unicode characters are there ?

Otto Stolz asked on the Unicode List how many Unicode characters there were, classified as control characters, format characters, graphic characters, private use chacters, noncharacters, surrogate code points, etc. Now I love Unicode facts, figures and trivia, so I can't resist trying to answer this question.

The "Unicode Version History" utility of BabelMap provides precisely the information requested by Otto for all versions of Unicode from 1.0.0 up to the current version (4.1 when I first wrote this post). This information is tabulated below :

I have now moved the detailed tables and charts of Unicode data to my website at How many Unicode characters are there ? If you don't want to go there, the short answer is 144,697 for Unicode 14.0 (released September 2021).