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Glossary of Unicode Terms

This glossary is originally based on The Unicode Standard, Version 4.0, and will be updated over time. It also has been slightly modified for the Web. In particular, some glyph examples used in definitions in the book are not included here. All references to sections, tables, etc., refer to the relevant location in the book. For the glossary as published in The Unicode Standard, Version 4.0, see the 4.0 Glossary in the online edition of the standard.

A

Abjad. A consonant writing system. The main letters are all consonants (or long vowels) with other vowels either left out entirely or indicated with secondary marking of the consonants. The best-known example is the Arabic writing system, and the term “abjad” is derived from the first four letters of the traditional order of the Arabic script.

Abstract Character. A unit of information used for the organization, control, or representation of textual data. (See definition D3 in Section 3.4, Characters and Encoding.)

Abstract Character Sequence. An ordered sequence of abstract characters. (See definition D4 in Section 3.4, Characters and Encoding.)

Abugida. A special type of writing system encompassing the many scripts of South and Southeast Asia that are historically derived from the ancient Brahmi script. The term abugida is derived from the North Semitic alphabetic order: alef, bet, gimel, dalet.

Accent Mark. A mark placed above, below, or to the side of a character to alter its phonetic value. (See also diacritic.)

Algorithm. A term used in a broad sense in the Unicode Standard, to mean the logical description of a process used to achieve a specified result. This does not require the actual procedure described in the algorithm to be followed; any implementation is conformant as long as the results are the same.

Alphabet. A writing system that consists of letters for the writing of both consonants and vowels. Consonants and vowels have equal status as letters in an alphabet. The Latin alphabet is the most widespread and well-known example of an alphabet. The correspondence between letters and sounds may be either more or less exact; most alphabets do not exhibit a one-to-one correspondence between distinct sounds (phonemes) and distinct letters (graphemes).

Alphabetic Property. Informative property of the primary units of alphabets and/or syllabaries. (See Section 4.9, Letters, Alphabetic, and Ideographic.)

Alphabetic Sorting. (See collation.)

Annotation. The association of secondary textual content with a point or range of the primary text. (The value of a particular annotation is considered to be a part of the “content” of the text. Typical examples include glossing, citations, exemplification, Japanese yomi, and so on.)

ANSI. (1) The American National Standards Institute. (2) The Microsoft collective name for all Windows code pages. Sometimes used specifically for code page 1252, which is a superset of ISO/IEC 8859-1.

Arabic Digits.  Forms of decimal digits used in most parts of the Arabic world (for instance, U+0660 ‡ , U+0661 · , U+0662 ‚ , U+0663 „). Although European digits  (1, 2, 3,…) derive historically from these forms, they are visually distinct and are coded separately. (Arabic digits are sometimes called Indic numerals; however, this nomenclature leads to confusion with the digits currently used with the scripts of India.) Arabic digits are referred to as Arabic-Indic digits in the Unicode Standard. Variant forms of Arabic digits used chiefly in Iran and Pakistan are referred to as Eastern Arabic-Indic digits. (See Section 8.2, Arabic.)

ASCII.  (1) The American Standard Code for Information Interchange, a 7-bit coded character set for information interchange. It is the U.S. national variant of ISO/IEC 646, and is formally the U.S. standard ANSI X3.4. It was proposed by ANSI  in 1963 and finalized in 1968. (2) The set of 128 Unicode characters from U+0000 to U+007F, including control codes, as well as graphic characters. (3) ASCII has been incorrectly used to refer to various 8-bit character encodings that include ASCII characters in the first 128 positions.

Assigned Character. Synonym for assigned to an abstract character. This refers to graphic, format, control, and private-use characters which have been encoded in the Unicode Standard. (See Section 2.4, Code Points and Characters.)

Assigned Code Point.  (See designated code point.)

Atomic Character. A character that is not decomposable. (See decomposable character.)

B

Base Character. A character that does not graphically combine with preceding characters, and that is neither a control nor a format character. (See definition D13 in Section 3.6, Combination.)

Basic Multilingual Plane. Plane 0, abbreviated as BMP.

Bicameral. A script that distinguishes between two cases. (See case.) Most often used in the context of European alphabets.

BIDI. Abbreviation of bidirectional, in reference to mixed left-to-right and right-to-left text.

Bidirectional Display. The process or result of mixing left-to-right oriented text and right-to-left oriented text in a single line. (See Unicode Standard Annex #9, “The Bidirectional Algorithm.”)

Big-endian. A computer architecture that stores multiple-byte numerical values with the most significant byte (MSB) values first.

Binary Files. Files containing nontextual information.

Block. A grouping of related characters within the Unicode encoding space. A block may contain unassigned positions, which are reserved.

BMP. Acronym for Basic Multilingual Plane.

BMP Character. A Unicode encoded character having a BMP code point. (See supplementary character.)

BMP Code Point. A Unicode code point between U+0000 and U+FFFF. (See supplementary code point.)

BNF. Abbreviation for Backus-Naur Form, a formal meta-syntax for describing context-free syntaxes. (For details, see Section 0.3, Notational Conventions.)

BOM. Acronym for byte order mark.

Bopomofo. An alphabetic script used primarily in the Republic of China (Taiwan) to write the sounds of Mandarin Chinese and some other dialects. Each symbol corresponds to either the syllable-initial or syllable-final sounds; it is therefore a subsyllabic script in its primary usage. The name is derived from the names of its first four elements. More properly known as zhuyin zimu or zhuyin fuhao in Mandarin Chinese.

Boustrophedon. A pattern of writing seen in some ancient manuscripts and inscriptions, where alternate lines of text are laid out in opposite directions, and where right-to-left lines generally use glyphs mirrored from their left-to-right forms. Literally, “as the ox turns,” referring to the plowing of a field.

Braille. A writing system using a series of raised dots to be read with the fingers by people who are blind or whose eyesight is not sufficient for reading printed material. (See Section 14.9, Braille.)

Braille Pattern. One of the 64 (for 6-dot Braille) or 256 (for 8-dot Braille) possible tangible dot combinations.

Byte. (1) The minimal unit of addressable storage for a particular computer architecture. (2) An octet. Note that many early computer architectures used bytes larger than 8 bits in size, but the industry has now standardized almost uniformly on 8-bit bytes. The Unicode Standard follows the current industry practice in equating the term byte with octet and using the more familiar term byte in all contexts. (See octet.)

Byte Order Mark. The Unicode character U+FEFF ZERO WIDTH NO-BREAK SPACE when used to indicate the byte order of a text. (See Section 2.11, Special Characters and Noncharacters, and Section 15.9, Specials.)

Byte Serialization. The order of a series of bytes determined by a computer architecture.

Byte-Swapped. Reversal of the order of a sequence of bytes.

C

Canonical. (1) Conforming to the general rules for encoding—that is, not compressed, compacted, or in any other form specified by a higher protocol. (2) Characteristic of a normative mapping and form of equivalence specified in Chapter 3, Conformance.

Canonical Decomposition. (See definition D23 in Section 3.7, Decomposition.)

Canonical Equivalent. Two character sequences are said to be canonical equivalents if their full canonical decompositions are identical. (See definition D24 in Section 3.7, Decomposition.)

Cantillation Mark. A mark that is used to indicate how a text is to be chanted or sung.

Capital Letter. Synonym for uppercase letter. (See case.)

Case. (1) Feature of certain alphabets where the letters have two distinct forms. These variants, which may differ markedly in shape and size, are called the uppercase letter (also known as capital or majuscule) and the lowercase letter (also known as small or minuscule). (2) Normative property of characters, consisting of uppercase, lowercase, and titlecase (Lu, Ll, and Lt). (See Section 4.2, Case—Normative.)

Case Mapping. The association of the uppercase, lowercase, and titlecase forms of a letter. (See Section 5.18, Case Mappings.)

CCS. Acronym for coded character set.

Cedilla. A mark originally placed beneath the letter c in French, Portuguese, and Spanish to indicate that the letter is to be pronounced as an s, as in façade. Obsolete Spanish diminutive of ceda, the letter z.

CEF. Acronym for character encoding form.

CES. Acronym for character encoding scheme.

Character. (1) The smallest component of written language that has semantic value; refers to the abstract meaning and/or shape, rather than a specific shape (see also glyph), though in code tables some form of visual representation is essential for the reader’s understanding. (2) Synonym for abstract character. (3) The basic unit of encoding for the Unicode character encoding. (4) The English name for the ideographic written elements of Chinese origin. (See ideograph (2).)

Character Block. (See block.)

Character Class. A set of characters sharing a particular set of properties.

Character Encoding Form. Mapping from a character set definition to the actual code units used to represent the data.

Character Encoding Scheme. A character encoding form plus byte serialization. There are seven character encoding schemes in Unicode: UTF-8, UTF-16, UTF-16BE, UTF-16LE, UTF-32, UTF-32BE, and UTF-32LE.

Character Properties. A set of property names and property values associated with individual characters. (See Chapter 4, Character Properties.)

Character Repertoire. The collection of characters included in a character set.

Character Sequence. Synonym for abstract character sequence.

Character Set. A collection of elements used to represent textual information.

Charset. (See coded character set.)

Chu Hán. The name for Han characters used in Vietnam; derived from hànzì.

Chu Nôm. A demotic script of Vietnam developed from components of Han characters. Its creators used methods similar to those used by the Chinese in creating Han characters.

CJK. Abbreviation for Chinese, Japanese, and Korean. A variant, CJKV, means Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese.

Coded Character Representation. A sequence of code points. Normally, this consists of a sequence of encoded characters, but it may also include noncharacters or reserved code points. (See definition D6 in Section 3.4, Characters and Encoding.)

Coded Character Sequence. Synonym for coded character representation.

Coded Character Set. A character set in which each character is assigned a numeric code point. Frequently abbreviated as character set, charset, or code set.

Code Page. A coded character set, often referring to a coded character set used by a personal computer—for example, PC code page 437, the default coded character set used by the U.S. English version of the DOS operating system.

Code Point. Any value in the Unicode codespace; that is, the range of integers from 0 to 10FFFF₁₆. (See definition D4b in Section 3.4, Characters and Encoding.)

Code Position. Synonym for code point. Used in ISO character encoding standards.

Code Set. (See coded character set.)

Code Unit. The minimal bit combination that can represent a unit of encoded text for processing or interchange. The Unicode Standard uses 8-bit code units in the UTF-8 encoding form, 16-bit code units in the UTF-16 encoding form, and 32-bit code units in the UTF-32 encoding form. (See definition D28a in Section 3.9, Unicode Encoding Forms.)

Code Value. Synonym for code unit.

Codespace. A range of numerical values available for encoding characters.

Collation. The process of ordering units of textual information. Collation is usually specific to a particular language. Also known as alphabetizing or alphabetic sorting. Unicode Technical Report #10, "Unicode Collation Algorithm," defines a complete, unambiguous, specified ordering for all characters in the Unicode Standard.

Combining Character. A character that graphically combines with a preceding base character. The combining character is said to apply to that base character. (See definition D14 in Section 3.6, Combination.) (See also nonspacing mark.)

Combining Character Sequence. A character sequence consisting of either a base character followed by a sequence of one or more combining characters, or a sequence of one or more combining characters. (See definition D17 in Section 3.6, Combination.)

Combining Class. A numeric value given to each combining Unicode character that determines with which other combining characters it typographically interacts. (See definition D46 in Section 3.11, Canonical Ordering Behavior.)

Compatibility. (1) Consistency with existing practice or preexisting character encoding standards. (2) Characteristic of a normative mapping and form of equivalence specified in Section 3.7, Decomposition.

Compatibility Character. A character that would not have been encoded except for compatibility and round-trip convertibility with other standards. (See Section 2.3, Compatibility Characters.)

Compatibility Composite Character. Synonym for compatibility decomposable character.

Compatibility Decomposable Character. A character whose compatibility decomposition is not identical to its canonical decomposition. (See definition D21 in Section 3.7, Decomposition.)

Compatibility Decomposition. (See definition D20 in Section 3.7, Decomposition.)

Compatibility Equivalent. Two character sequences are said to be compatibility equivalents if their full compatibility decompositions are identical. (See definition D22 in Section 3.7, Decomposition.)

Compatibility Precomposed Character. Synonym for compatibility decomposable character.

Compatibility Variant. A character that generally can be remapped to another character without loss of information other than formatting.

Composite Character. (See decomposable character.)

Composite Character Sequence. (See combining character sequence.)

Conformance. Adherence to a specified set of criteria for use of a standard. (See Chapter 3, Conformance.)

Conjunct Form. A ligated form representing a consonant conjunct.

Consonant Cluster. A sequence of two or more consonantal sounds. Depending on the writing system, a consonant cluster may be represented by a single character or by a sequence of characters. (Contrast digraph.)

Consonant Conjunct. A sequence of two or more adjacent consonantal letterforms, consisting of a sequence of one or more dead consonants followed by a normal, live consonant letter. A consonant conjunct may be ligated into a single conjunct form, or it may be represented by graphically separable parts, such as subscripted forms of the consonant letters. Consonant conjuncts are associated with the Brahmi family of Indic scripts. (See Section 9.1, Devanagari.)

Contextual Variant. A text element can have a presentation form that depends on the textual context in which it is rendered. This presentation form is known as a contextual variant.

Control Codes. The 65 characters in the ranges U+0000..U+001F and U+007F..U+009F. Also known as control characters.

Cursive. Writing where the letters of a word are connected.

D

DBCS. Acronym for double-byte character set.

Dead Consonant. An Indic consonant character followed by a virama character. This sequence indicates that the consonant has lost its inherent vowel. (See Section 9.1, Devanagari.)

Decimal Digits. Digits that can be used to form decimal-radix numbers.

Decomposable Character. A character that is equivalent to a sequence of one or more other characters, according to the decomposition mappings found in the names list of Section 16.1, Character Names List, and those described in Section 3.12, Conjoining Jamo Behavior. It may also be known as a precomposed character or a composite character. (See definition D18 in Section 3.7, Decomposition.)

Decomposition. (1) The process of separating or analyzing a text element into component units. These component units may not have any functional status, but may be simply formal units—that is, abstract shapes. (2) A sequence of one or more characters that is equivalent to a decomposable character. (See definition D19 in Section 3.7, Decomposition.)

Defective Combining Character Sequence. A combining character sequence that does not start with a base character. (See definition D17a in Section 3.6, Combination.)

Demotic Script. (1) A script or a form of a script used to write the vernacular or common speech of some language community. (2) A simplified form of the ancient Egyptian hieratic writing.

Dependent Vowel. A symbol or sign that represents a vowel and that is attached or combined with another symbol, usually one that represents a consonant. For example, in writing systems based on Arabic, Hebrew, and Indic scripts, vowels are normally represented as dependent vowel signs.

Deprecated. A coded character whose use is strongly discouraged. Such characters are retained in the standard, but should not be used. (See definition D7a in Section 3.4, Characters and Encoding.) (Not the same as obsolete.)

Designated Code Point. Any code point that has either been assigned to an abstract character (assigned characters) or that has otherwise been given a normative function by the standard (surrogate code points and noncharacters). This definition excludes reserved code points. Also known as assigned code point. (See Section 2.4, Code Points and Characters.)

Diacritic. (1) A mark applied or attached to a symbol to create a new symbol that represents a modified or new value. (2) A mark applied to a symbol irrespective of whether it changes the value of that symbol. In the latter case, the diacritic usually represents an independent value (for example, an accent, tone, or some other linguistic information). Also called diacritical mark or diacritical. (See also combining characterand nonspacing mark.)

Diaeresis. Two horizontal dots over a letter, as in naïve. The diaeresis is not distinguished from the umlaut in the Unicode character encoding. (See umlaut.)

Digits. (See Arabic digits, European digits, and Indic digits.)

Digraph. A pair of signs or symbols (two graphs), which together represent a single sound or a single linguistic unit. The English writing system employs many digraphs (for example, th, ch, sh, qu, and so on). The same two symbols may not always be interpreted as a digraph (for example, cathode versus cathouse). When three signs are so combined, they are called a trigraph. More than three are usually called an n-graph.

Dingbats. Typographical symbols and ornaments.

Diphthong. A pair of vowels that are considered a single vowel for the purpose of phonemic distinction. One of the two vowels is more prominent than the other. In writing systems, diphthongs are sometimes written with one symbol, and sometimes with more than one symbol (for example, with a digraph).

Direction. (See paragraph direction.)

Directionality Property. A property of every graphic character that determines its horizontal ordering as specified in Unicode Standard Annex #9, “The Bidirectional Algorithm.” (See Section 4.4, Directionality—Normative.)

Display Cell. A rectangular region on a display device within which one or more glyphs are imaged.

Display Order. The order of glyphs presented in text rendering.

Double-Byte Character Set. One of a number of character sets defined for representing Chinese, Japanese, or Korean text (for example, JIS X 0208-1990). These character sets are often encoded in such a way as to allow double-byte character encodings to be mixed with single-byte character encodings. Abbreviated DBCS. (See also multibyte character set.)

Ductility. The ability of a cursive font to stretch or compress the connective baseline to effect text justification.

Dynamic Composition. Creation of composite forms such as accented letters or Hangul syllables from a sequence of characters.

E

EBCDIC. Acronym for Extended Binary-Coded Decimal Interchange Code. A group of coded character sets used on mainframes that consist of 8-bit coded characters. EBCDIC coded character sets reserve the first 64 code positions (x00 to x3F) for control codes, and reserve the range x41 to xFE for graphic characters. The English alphabetic characters are in discontinuous segments with uppercase at xC1 to xC9, xD1 to xD9, xE2 to xE9, and lowercase at x81 to x89, x91 to x99, xA2 to xA9.

Embedding. A concept relevant to bidirectional behavior. (See Unicode Standard Annex #9, “The Bidirectional Algorithm,” for detailed terminology and definitions.)

Encapsulated Text. (1) Plain text surrounded by formatting information. (2) Text recoded to pass through narrow transmission channels or to match communication protocols.

Encoded Character. An abstract character together with its associated Unicode scalar value (code point). By itself, an abstract character has no numerical value, but the process of “encoding a character” associates a particular Unicode scalar value with a particular abstract character, thereby resulting in an “encoded character.”

Encoding Form. (See character encoding form.)

Encoding Scheme. (See character encoding scheme.)

Equivalence. In the context of text processing, the process or result of establishing whether two text elements are identical in some respect.

Equivalent Sequence. (See canonical equivalent.)

Escape Sequence. A sequence of bytes that is used for code extension. The first byte in the sequence is escape (hex 1B).

European Digits. Forms of decimal digits first used in Europe and now used worldwide. Historically, these digits were derived from the Arabic digits; they are sometimes called “Arabic numerals,” but this nomenclature leads to confusion with the real Arabic digits.

F

Fancy Text. (See rich text.)

Floating (diacritic, accent, mark). (See nonspacing mark.)

Font. A collection of glyphs used for the visual depiction of character data. A font is often associated with a set of parameters (for example, size, posture, weight, and serifness), which, when set to particular values, generate a collection of imagable glyphs.

Formatted Text. (See rich text.)

Formatting Codes. Characters that are inherently invisible but that have an effect on the surrounding characters.

FSS-UTF. Acronym for File System Safe UCS Transformation Format, published by the X/Open Company Ltd., and intended for the UNIX environment. Now known as UTF-8.

Fullwidth. Characters of East Asian character sets whose glyph image extends across the entire character display cell. In legacy character sets, fullwidth characters are normally encoded in two or three bytes. The Japanese term for fullwidth characters is zenkaku.

G

GCGID. Acronym for Graphic Character Global Identifier. These are listed in the IBM document Character Data Representation Architecture, Level 1, Registry SC09-1391.

General Category. Partition of the characters into major classes such as letters, punctuation, and symbols, and further subclasses for each of the major classes. (See Section 4.5, General Category—Normative.)

Generative. Synonym for productive.

Glyph. (1) An abstract form that represents one or more glyph images. (2) A synonym for glyph image. In displaying Unicode character data, one or more glyphs may be selected to depict a particular character. These glyphs are selected by a rendering engine during composition and layout processing. (See also character.)

Glyph Code. A numeric code that refers to a glyph. Usually, the glyphs contained in a font are referenced by their glyph code. Glyph codes may be local to a particular font; that is, a different font containing the same glyphs may use different codes.

Glyph Identifier. Similar to a glyph code, a glyph identifier is a label used to refer to a glyph within a font. A font may employ both local and global glyph identifiers.

Glyph Image. The actual, concrete image of a glyph representation having been rasterized or otherwise imaged onto some display surface.

Glyph Metrics. A collection of properties that specify the relative size and positioning along with other features of a glyph.

Grapheme. (1) A minimally distinctive unit of writing in the context of a particular writing system. For example, ‹b› and ‹d› are distinct graphemes in English writing systems because there exist distinct words like big and dig. Conversely, a lowercase italiform letter a and a lowercase Roman letter a are not distinct graphemes because no word is distinguished on the basis of these two different forms. (2) What a user thinks of as a character.

Grapheme Cluster. A particular text element defined in Unicode Standard Annex #29, “Text Boundaries,” consisting of any of the following: an atomic character, a combining character sequence consisting of a base character plus one or more nonspacing marks or enclosing marks, or a sequence of Hangul jamos equivalent to a Hangul syllable.

Graphic Character. (1) A character typically associated with a visible display representation. (See also glyph.) (2) Any character that is not primarily associated with a control or formatting function.

Guillemet. Punctuation marks resembling small less-than and greater-than signs, used as quotation marks in French and other languages. (See “Language-Based Usage of Quotation Marks” in Section 6.2, General Punctuation.)

H

Halant. A preferred Hindi synonym for a virama. It literally means killer, referring to its function of killing the inherent vowel of a consonant letter. (See virama.)

Half-Consonant Form. In the Devanagari script, and certain other scripts of the Brahmi family of Indic scripts, a dead consonant may be depicted in the so-called half-form. This form is composed of the distinctive part of a consonant letter symbol without its vertical stem. It may be used to create conjunct forms that follow a horizontal layout pattern. Also known as half-form.

Halfwidth. Characters of East Asian character sets whose glyph image occupies half of the character display cell. In legacy character sets, halfwidth characters are normally encoded in a single byte. The Japanese term for halfwidth characters is hankaku.

Han Characters. Ideographic characters of Chinese origin. (See Section 11.1, Han.)

Hangul. The name of the script used to write the Korean language.

Hangul Syllable. (1) Any of the 11,172 encoded characters of the Hangul Syllables character block, U+AC00..U+D7A3. Also called a precomposed Hangul syllable to clearly distinguish it from a Korean syllable block. (2) Loosely speaking, a Korean syllable block.

Hanja. The Korean name for Han characters; derived from the Chinese word hànzì.

Hankaku. (See halfwidth.)

Han Unification. The process of identifying Han characters that are in common among the writing systems of Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese.

Hànzì. The Mandarin Chinese name for Han characters.

Harakat. Marks that indicate vowels or other modifications of consonant letters in Arabic script.

Hasant. The Bangla name for halant. (See virama.)

Higher-Level Protocol. Any agreement on the interpretation of Unicode characters that extends beyond the scope of this standard. Note that such an agreement need not be formally announced in data; it may be implicit in the context. (See definition D8 in Section 3.4, Characters and Encoding.)

High-Surrogate Code Point. A Unicode code point in the range U+D800 to U+DBFF. (See definition D25 in Section 3.8, Surrogates.)

High-Surrogate Code Unit. A 16-bit code unit in the range D800₁₆ to DBFF₁₆, used in UTF-16 as the leading code unit of a surrogate pair. Also known as a leading surrogate. (See definition D25a in Section 3.8, Surrogates.)

Hiragana. One of two standard syllabaries associated with the Japanese writing system. Hiragana syllables are typically used in the representation of native Japanese words and grammatical particles.

HTML. HyperText Markup Language. A text description language related to SGML; it mixes text format markup with plain text content to describe formatted text. HTML is ubiquitous as the source language for Web pages on the Internet. Starting with HTML 4.0, the Unicode Standard functions as the reference character set for HTML content. (See also SGML.)

I

IANA. Internet Assigned Numbers Authority.

Ideograph. (1) Any symbol that primarily denotes an idea (or meaning) in contrast to a sound (or pronunciation)—for example, a symbol showing a telephone. (2) An English term commonly used to refer to Han characters, equivalent to the borrowings hànzì, kanji, and hanja.

Ideographic Property. Informative property of characters that are ideographs. (See Section 4.9, Letters, Alphabetic, and Ideographic.)

Ill-Formed Code Unit Sequence. A code unit sequence that does not follow the specification of a Unicode encoding form. (See definition D30 in Section 3.9, Unicode Encoding Forms.)

In-band. An in-band channel conveys information about text by embedding that information within the text itself, with special syntax to distinguish it. In-band information is encoded in the same character set as the text, and is interspersed with and carried along with the text data. Examples are XML and HTML markup.

Independent Vowel. In Indic scripts, certain vowels are depicted using independent letter symbols that stand on their own. This is often true when a word starts with a vowel or a word consists of only a vowel.

Indic Digits. Forms of decimal digits used in various Indic scripts (for example, Devanagari: U+0966, U+0967, U+0968, U+0969). Arabic digits (and, eventually, European digits) derive historically from these forms.

Informative. Information in this standard that is not normative but that contributes to the correct use and implementation of the standard.

Inherent Vowel. In writing systems based on a script in the Brahmi family of Indic scripts, a consonant letter symbol normally has an inherent vowel, unless otherwise indicated. The phonetic value of this vowel differs among the various languages written with these writing systems. An inherent vowel is overridden either by indicating another vowel with an explicit vowel sign or by using virama to create a dead consonant.

Inner Caps. Mixed case format where an uppercase letter is in a position other than first in the word—for example, “G” in the Name “McGowan.”

IPA. (1) The International Phonetic Alphabet. (2) The International Phonetic Association, which defines and maintains the International Phonetic Alphabet.

IRG. Abbreviation for Ideographic Rapporteur Group, a subgroup of ISO/IEC JTC1/SC2/WG2. (See Appendix A, Han Unification History.)

ISCII. Acronym for Indian Script Code for Information Interchange.

J

Jamo. The Korean name for a single letter of the Hangul script. Jamos are used to form Hangul syllables.

Joiner. An invisible character that affects the joining behavior of surrounding characters. (See Section 8.2, Arabic, and “Cursive Connection” in Section 15.2, Layout Controls.)

JTC1. The Joint Technical Committee 1 of the International Organization for Standardization and the International Electrotechnical Commission responsible for information technology standardization.

K

Kana. The name of a primarily syllabic script used by the Japanese writing system. It comes in two forms, hiragana and katakana. The former is used to write particles, grammatical affixes, and words that have no kanji form; the latter is used primarily to write foreign words.

Kanji. The Japanese name for Han characters; derived from the Chinese word hànzì. Also romanized as kanzi.

Katakana. One of two standard syllabaries associated with the Japanese writing system. Katakana syllables are typically used in representation of borrowed vocabulary (other than that of Chinese origin), sound-symbolic interjections, or phonetic representation of “difficult” kanji characters in Japanese.

Kerning. (1) Changing the space between certain pairs of letters to improve the appearance of the text. (2) Process of mapping from pairs of glyphs to a positioning offset used to change the space between letters.

Korean Syllable Block. A sequence of one or more jamos of the form L* V* T*, where L represents a leading consonant (choseong), V represents a vowel (jungseong), and T represents a trailing consonant (jongseong), or any canonically equivalent sequence including a precomposed Hangul syllable. (See Section 3.12, Conjoining Jamo Behavior.)

L

Leading Surrogate. Synonym for high-surrogate code unit.

Letter. (1) An element of an alphabet. In a broad sense, it includes elements of syllabaries and ideographs. (2) Informative property of characters that are used to write words.

Ligature. A glyph representing a combination of two or more characters. In the Latin script, there are only a few in modern use, such as the ligatures between “f” and “i” or “f” and “l”. Other scripts make use of many ligatures, depending on the font and style.

Little-endian. A computer architecture that stores multiple-byte numerical values with the least significant byte (LSB) values first.

Logical Order. The order in which text is typed on a keyboard. For the most part, logical order corresponds to phonetic order. (See Section 2.2, Unicode Design Principles.)

Logical Store. Memory representation.

Logosyllabary. A writing system in which the units are used primarily to write words and/or morphemes of words, with some subsidiary usage to represent just syllabic sounds. The best example is the Han script.

Lowercase. (See case.)

Low-Surrogate Code Point. A Unicode code point in the range U+DC00 to U+DFFF. (See definition D26 in Section 3.8, Surrogates.)

Low-Surrogate Code Unit. A 16-bit code unit in the range DC0016 to DFFF16, used in UTF-16 as the trailing code unit of a surrogate pair. Also known as a trailing surrogate. (See definition D26a in Section 3.8, Surrogates.)

LSB. Acronym for least significant byte.

LZW. Acronym for Lempel-Ziv-Welch, a standard algorithm widely used for compression of data.

M

Majuscule. Synonym for uppercase. (See case.)

Mathematical Property. Informative property of characters that are used as operators in mathematical formulae.

Matra. A dependent vowel in an Indic script. It is the name for vowel letters that follow consonant letters in logical order. A matra often has a completely different letterform from that for the same phonological vowel used as an independent letter.

MBCS. Abbreviation for multibyte character set.

MIME. Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions. MIME is a standard that allows the embedding of arbitrary documents and other binary data of known types (images, sound, video, and so on) into e-mail handled by ordinary Internet electronic mail interchange protocols.

Minuscule. Synonym for lowercase. (See case.)

Mirrored Property. The property of characters whose images are mirrored horizontally in text that is laid out from right to left (versus left to right). (See Section 4.7, Bidi Mirrored—Normative.)

Missing Glyph. (See replacement glyph.)

Modifier Letter. A character with the Lm General Category in the Unicode Character Database. Modifier letters look like letters or punctuation, and modify the pronunciation of other letters (similar to diacritics). (See Section 7.6, Modifier Letters.)

Monotonic. Modern Greek written with the basic accent, the tonos.

MSB. Acronym for most significant byte.

Multibyte Character Set. A character set encoded with a variable number of bytes per character, often abbreviated as MBCS. Many large character sets have been defined as MBCS so as to keep strict compatibility with the ASCII subset and/or ISO/IEC 2022.

N

Nekudot. Marks that indicate vowels or other modifications of consonantal letters in Hebrew.

Neutral Character. A character that can be written either right to left or left to right, depending on context. (See Unicode Standard Annex #9, “The Bidirectional Algorithm.”)

NFC. (See Normalization Form C.)

NFD. (See Normalization Form D.)

NFKC. (See Normalization Form KC.)

NFKD. (See Normalization Form KD.)

Noncharacters. Unicode code points that are permanently reserved for internal use, and that should never be interchanged. Noncharacters consist of the values U+nFFFE and U+nFFFF, where n is from 0 to 10₁₆.
Non-joiner. An invisible character that affects the joining behavior of surrounding characters. (See Section 8.2, Arabic, and “Cursive Connection” in Section 15.2, Layout Controls.)

Non-overridable. A characteristic of a Unicode character property that cannot be changed by a higher-level protocol.

Nonspacing Diacritic. A diacritic that is a nonspacing mark.

Nonspacing Mark. A combining character whose positioning in presentation is dependent on its base character. It generally does not consume space along the visual baseline in and of itself. (See definition D15 in Section 3.6, Combination.) (See also combining character.)

Normalization. A process of removing alternate representations of equivalent sequences from textual data, to convert the data into a form that can be binary-compared for equivalence. In the Unicode Standard, normalization refers specifically to processing to ensure that canonical-equivalent (and/or compatibility-equivalent) strings have unique representations. For more information, see “Equivalent Sequences” in Section 2.2, Unicode Design Principles, and Unicode Standard Annex #15, "Unicode Normalization Forms."

Normalization Form. One of the four Unicode normalization forms defined in Unicode Standard Annex #15, "Unicode Normalization Forms"—namely, NFC, NFD, NFKC, and NFKD.

Normalization Form C (NFC). The normalization form that results from the canonical decomposition of a Unicode string, followed by the replacement of all decomposed sequences by primary composites where possible.

Normalization Form D (NFD). The normalization form that results from the canonical decomposition of a Unicode string.

Normalization Form KC (NFKC). The normalization form that results from the compatibility decomposition of a Unicode string, followed by the replacement of all decomposed sequences by primary composites where possible.

Normalization Form KD (NFKD). The normalization form that results from the compatibility decomposition of a Unicode string.

Normative. Required for conformance with the Unicode Standard.

NSM. Acronym for nonspacing mark.

Numeric Value Property. A property of characters used to represent numbers. (See Section 4.6, Numeric Value—Normative.)

O

Obsolete. Applies to a character that is no longer in current use, but that has been used historically. Whether a character is obsolete depends on context: For example, the Cyrillic letter big yus is obsolete for Russian, but is used in modern Bulgarian. (Not the same as deprecated.)

Octet. An ordered sequence of eight bits considered as a unit. The Unicode Standard follows current industry practice in referring to an octet as a byte. (See byte.)

Out-of-Band An out-of-band channel conveys additional information about text in such a way that the textual content, as encoded, is completely untouched and unmodified. This is typically done by separate data structures that point into the text.

Overridable. A characteristic of a Unicode character property that may be changed by a higher-level protocol to create desired implementation effects.

P-Q

Paragraph Direction. The default direction (left or right) of the text of a paragraph. This direction does not change the display order of characters within an Arabic or English word. However, it does change the display order of adjacent Arabic and English words, and the display order of neutral characters, such as punctuation and spaces. For more details, see Unicode Standard Annex #9, “The Bidirectional Algorithm,” especially definitions BD2–BD5.

Phoneme. A minimally distinct sound in the context of a particular spoken language. For example, in American English, /p/ and /b/ are distinct phonemes because pat and bat are distinct; however, the two different sounds of /t/ in tick and stick are not distinct in English, even though they are distinct in other languages such as Thai.

Pinyin. Standard system for the romanization of Chinese on the basis of Mandarin pronunciation.

Pivot Conversion. The use of a third character encoding to serve as an intermediate step in the conversion between two other character encodings. The Unicode Standard is widely used to support pivot conversion, as its character repertoire is a superset of most other coded character sets.

Plain Text. Computer-encoded text that consists only of a sequence of code points from a given standard, with no other formatting or structural information. Plain text interchange is commonly used between computer systems that do not share higher-level protocols. (See also rich text.)

Plane. A range of 65,536 (10000₁₆) contiguous Unicode code points, where the first code point is an integer multiple of 65,636 (10000₁₆). Planes are numbered from 0 to 16, with the number being the first code point of the plane divided by 65,536. Thus Plane 0 is U+0000..U+FFFF, Plane 1 is U+10000..U+1FFFF, ..., and Plane 16 (10₁₆) is U+100000..10FFFF. (Note that ISO/IEC 10646 uses hexadecimal notation for the plane numbers—for example, Plane B instead of Plane 11). (See Basic Multilingual Plane and supplementary planes.)

Points. (1) The nonspacing vowels and other signs of written Hebrew. (2) A unit of measurement in typography.

Polytonic. Ancient Greek written with several contrastive accents.

Precomposed Character. (See decomposable character.)

Presentation Form. A ligature or variant glyph that has been encoded as a character for compatibility. (See also compatibility character (1).)

Primary Composite. A character that has a canonical decomposition mapping in the Unicode Character Database (or is a canonical Hangul decomposition) but which is not in the Composition Exclusion Table. (See Unicode Standard Annex #15, "Unicode Normalization Forms.")

Private Use. Refers to designated code points in the Unicode Standard or other character encoding standards whose interpretations are not specified in those standards and whose use may be determined by private agreement among cooperating users.

Private-Use Code Point. Code points in the ranges U+E000..U+F8FF, U+F0000..U+FFFFD, and U+100000..U+10FFFD. (See definition D12 in Section 3.5, Properties.) These code points are designated in the Unicode Standard for private use.

Productive. Said of a feature or rule that can be employed in novel combinations or circumstances, rather than being restricted to a fixed list. In the Unicode Standard, combining marks, particularly the accents, are productive. On the other hand, variation selectors are deliberately not productive. Also known as generative.

Property. (See character properties.)

Provisional. A property or feature that is unapproved and tentative, and that may be incomplete or otherwise not in a usable state.

Pulli. The Tamil name for virama. (See virama.)

R

Radical. A structural component of a Han character conventionally used for indexing. The traditional number of such radicals is 214.

Rendering. (1) The process of selecting and laying out glyphs for the purpose of depicting characters. (2) The process of making glyphs visible on a display device.

Repertoire. (See character repertoire.)

Replacement Character. Character used as a substitute for an uninterpretable character from another encoding. The Unicode Standard uses U+FFFD REPLACEMENT CHARACTER for this function.

Replacement Glyph. A glyph used to render a character that cannot be rendered with the correct appearance in a particular font. It often is shown as an open or black rectangle. Also known as a missing glyph. (See Section 5.3, Unknown and Missing Characters.)

Reserved. Refers to undesignated code points, which are set aside for future standardization. (See Section 2.4, Code Points and Characters.)

Rich Text. Also known as styled text. The result of adding information to plain text. Examples of information that can be added include font data, color, formatting information, phonetic annotations, interlinear text, and so on. The Unicode Standard does not address the representation of rich text. It is expected that systems and applications will implement proprietary forms of rich text. Some public forms of rich text are available (for example, ODA, HTML, and SGML). When everything except primary content is removed from rich text, only plain text should remain.

Row. A range of 256 contiguous Unicode code points, where the first code point is an integer multiple of 256. Two code points are in the same row if they share all but the last two hexadecimal digits. (See plane.)

S

SAM. Acronym for Syriac abbreviation mark.

SBCS. Acronym for single-byte character set. Any 1-byte character encoding. This term is generally used in contrast with DBCS and/or MBCS.

Scalar Value. (See Unicode scalar value.)

Script. A collection of symbols used to represent textual information in one or more writing systems.

SGML. Standard Generalized Markup Language. A standard framework, defined in ISO 8879, for defining particular text markup languages. The SGML framework allows for mixing structural tags that describe format with the plain text content of documents, so that fancy text can be fully described in a plain text stream of data. (See also HTML, XML, and rich text.)

Shaping Characters. Characters that assume different glyphic forms depending on the context.

Shift-JIS. A shifted encoding of the Japanese character encoding standard, JIS X 0208, widely deployed in PCs.

Sinogram. Chinese character. (See ideograph.)

SJIS. Short for Shift-JIS.

Small Letter. Synonym for lowercase letter. (See case.)

Sorting. (See collation.)

Spacing Mark. A combining character that is not a nonspacing mark. (See nonspacing mark.)

Standard Korean Syllable Block. A Korean syllable block with at least one L and one V. The L and/or V may be filler characters. (See Section 3.12, Conjoining Jamo Behavior.)

Static Form. (See decomposable character.)

Styled Text. (See rich text.)

Subtending Mark. A format character whose graphic form extends under a sequence of following characters—for example, U+0600 ARABIC NUMBER SIGN.

Supplementary Character. A Unicode encoded character having a supplementary code point.

Supplementary Code Point. A Unicode code point between U+10000 and U+10FFFF.

Supplementary Planes. Planes 1 through 16, consisting of the supplementary code points.

Surrogate Character. A misnomer. It would be an encoded character having a surrogate code point, which is impossible. Do not use this term.

Surrogate Code Point. A Unicode code point in the range U+D800 through U+DFFF. Reserved for use by UTF-16, where a pair of surrogate code units (a high surrogate followed by a low surrogate) “stand in” for a supplementary code point.

Surrogate Pair. A representation for a single abstract character that consists of a sequence of two 16-bit code units, where the first value of the pair is a high-surrogate code unit, and the second is a low-surrogate code unit. (See definition D27 in Section 3.8, Surrogates.)

Syllabary. A type of writing system in which each symbol typically represents both a consonant and a vowel, or in some instances more than one consonant and a vowel.

Syllable. (1) An element of a syllabary. (2) A basic unit of articulation that corresponds to a pulmonary pulse.

Symmetric Swapping. The process of rendering a character with a mirrored glyph when its resolved directionality is right-to-left in a bidirectional context. (See mirrored property and Unicode Standard Annex #9, “The Bidirectional Algorithm.”)

T

Tagging. The association of attributes of text with a point or range of the primary text. The value of a particular tag is not generally considered to be a part of the “content” of the text. A typical example of tagging is to mark the language or the font for a portion of text.

Tailorable. A characteristic of an algorithm for which a higher-level protocol may specify different results than those specified in the algorithm. A tailorable algorithm without actual tailoring is also known as a default algorithm, and the results of an algorithm without tailoring are known as the default results.

TeX. Computer language designed for use in typesetting—in particular, for typesetting math and other technical material. (According to Knuth, TeX rhymes with the word blecchhh.)

Text Element. A minimum unit of text in relation to a particular text process, in the context of a given writing system. In general, the mapping between text elements and code points is many-to-many. (See Chapter 2, General Structure.)

Titlecase. Uppercased initial letter followed by lowercase letters in words. A casing convention often used in titles, headers, and entries, as exemplified in this glossary.

Tone Mark. A diacritic or nonspacing mark that represents a phonemic tone. Tone languages are common in Southeast Asia and Africa. Because tones always accompany vowels (the syllabic nucleus), they are most frequently written using functionally independent marks attached to a vowel symbol. However, some writing systems such as Thai place tone marks on consonant symbols; Chinese does not use tone marks (except when it is written phonemically).

Tonos. The basic accent in modern Greek, having the form of an acute accent.

Trailing Surrogate. Synonym for low-surrogate code unit.

Transcoding. Conversion of character data between different character sets.

Transformation Format. A mapping from a coded character sequence to a unique sequence of code units (typically bytes).

Triangulation. (See pivot conversion.)

U

UCA. Acronym for Unicode Collation Algorithm. (See Unicode Technical Standard #10, “Unicode Collation Algorithm.”)

UCD. Acronym for Unicode Character Database. (See Section 4.1, Unicode Character Database.)

UCS. Acronym for Universal Character Set, which is specified by International Standard ISO/IEC 10646.

UCS-2. ISO/IEC 10646 encoding form: Universal Character Set coded in 2 octets. (See Appendix C, Relationship to ISO/IEC 10646.)

UCS-4. ISO/IEC 10646 encoding form: Universal Character Set coded in 4 octets. (See Appendix C, Relationship to ISO/IEC 10646.)

Umlaut. Two horizontal dots over a letter, as in German Köpfe. The umlaut is not distinguished from the diaeresis in the Unicode character encoding. (See diaeresis.)

Unassigned. Code points that either are reserved for future use or are never to be used.

Unassigned Character. Synonym for not assigned to an abstract character. This refers to surrogate code points, noncharacters, and reserved code points. (See Section 2.4, Code Points and Characters.)

Unassigned Code Point. (See undesignated code point.)

Undesignated Code Point. Synonym for reserved code point. These code points are reserved for future assignment and have no other designated normative function in the standard. (See Section 2.4, Code Points and Characters.)

Unicameral. A script that has no case distinctions. Most often used in the context of European alphabets.

Unicode Character Database. A collection of files providing normative and informative Unicode character properties and mappings. (See Chapter 4, Character Properties, and the Unicode Character Database.)

Unicode Encoding Form. A character encoding form that assigns each Unicode scalar value to a unique code unit sequence. The Unicode Standard defines three Unicode encoding forms: UTF-8, UTF-16, and UTF-32. (See definition D29 in Section 3.9, Unicode Encoding Forms.)

Unicode Encoding Scheme. A specified byte serialization for a Unicode encoding form, including the specification of the handling of a byte order mark (BOM), if allowed. (See definition D38 in Section 3.10, Unicode Encoding Schemes.)

Unicode Scalar Value. Any Unicode code point except high-surrogate and low-surrogate code points. In other words, the ranges of integers 0 to D7FF₁₆ and E000₁₆ to 10FFFF₁₆ inclusive. (See definition D28 in Section 3.9, Unicode Encoding Forms.)

Unicode Signature. An implicit marker to identify a file as containing Unicode text in a particular encoding form. An initial byte order mark (BOM) may be used as a Unicode signature.

Unicode String. A code unit sequence containing code units of a particular Unicode encoding form. (See definition D29a in Section 3.9, Unicode Encoding Forms.)

Unicode Transformation Format. An ambiguous synonym for either Unicode encoding form or Unicode encoding scheme. The latter terms are now preferred.

Unification. The process of identifying characters that are in common among writing systems.

UPA. Acronym for Uralic Phonetic Alphabet.

Uppercase. (See case.)

URO. Acronym for Unified Repertoire and Ordering, the original set of CJK unified ideographs used in the Unicode Standard.

UTF. Acronym for Unicode (or UCS) Transformation Format.

UTF-2. Obsolete name for UTF-8.

UTF-7. Unicode (or UCS) Transformation Format, 7-bit encoding form, specified by RFC-2152.

UTF-8. (1) The UTF-8 encoding form. (2) The UTF-8 encoding scheme. (3) “UCS Transformation Format 8,” defined in Annex D of ISO/IEC 10646:2003, technically equivalent to the definitions in the Unicode Standard.

UTF-8 Encoding Form. The Unicode encoding form which assigns each Unicode scalar value to an unsigned byte sequence of one to four bytes in length, as specified in Table 3-5, UTF-8 Bit Distribution. (See definition D36 in Section 3.9, Unicode Encoding Forms.)

UTF-8 Encoding Scheme. The Unicode encoding scheme that serializes a UTF-8 code unit sequence in exactly the same order as the code unit sequence itself. (See definition D39 in Section 3.10, Unicode Encoding Schemes.)

UTF-16. (1) The UTF-16 encoding form. (2) The UTF-16 encoding scheme. (3) “Transformation format for 16 planes of Group 00,” defined in Annex C of ISO/IEC 10646:2003, technically equivalent to the definitions in the Unicode Standard.

UTF-16 Encoding Form. The Unicode encoding form which assigns each Unicode scalar value in the ranges U+0000..U+D7FF and U+E000..U+FFFF to a single unsigned 16-bit code unit with the same numeric value as the Unicode scalar value, and which assigns each Unicode scalar value in the range U+10000..U+10FFFF to a surrogate pair, according to Table 3-4, UTF-16 Bit Distribution. (See definition D35 in Section 3.9, Unicode Encoding Forms.)

UTF-16 Encoding Scheme. The UTF-16 encoding scheme that serializes a UTF-16 code unit sequence as a byte sequence in either big-endian or little-endian formats. (See definition D42 in Section 3.10, Unicode Encoding Schemes.)

UTF-16BE. The Unicode encoding scheme that serializes a UTF-16 code unit sequence as a byte sequence in big-endian format. (See definition D40 in Section 3.10, Unicode Encoding Schemes.)

UTF-16LE. The Unicode encoding scheme that serializes a UTF-16 code unit sequence as a byte sequence in little-endian format. (See definition D41 in Section 3.10, Unicode Encoding Schemes.)

UTF-32. (1) The UTF-32 encoding form. (2) The UTF-32 encoding scheme.

UTF-32 Encoding Form. The Unicode encoding form which assigns each Unicode scalar value to a single unsigned 32-bit code unit with the same numeric value as the Unicode scalar value. (See definition D31 in Section 3.9, Unicode Encoding Forms.)

UTF-32 Encoding Scheme. The Unicode encoding scheme that serializes a UTF-32 code unit sequence as a byte sequence in either big-endian or little-endian formats. (See definition D45 in Section 3.10, Unicode Encoding Schemes.)

UTF-32BE. The Unicode encoding scheme that serializes a UTF-32 code unit sequence as a byte sequence in big-endian format. (See definition D43 in Section 3.10, Unicode Encoding Schemes.)

UTF-32LE. The Unicode encoding scheme that serializes a UTF-32 code unit sequence as a byte sequence in little-endian format. (See definition D44 in Section 3.10, Unicode Encoding Schemes.)

V

Virama. From Sanskrit. The name of a sign used in many Indic and other Brahmi-derived scripts to suppress the inherent vowel of the consonant to which it is applied, thereby generating a dead consonant. (See Section 9.1, Devanagari.) The sign varies in shape from script to script, and may be known by other names in various languages. For example, in Hindi it is known as hal or halant, in Bangla it is called hasant, and in Tamil, pulli.

Visual Ambiguity. A situation arising from two characters (or sequences of characters) being rendered indistinguishably.

Visual Order. Characters ordered as they are presented for reading. (Contrast with logical order.)

Vocalization. Marks placed above, below, or within consonants to indicate vowels or other aspects of pronunciation. A feature of Middle Eastern scripts.

Vowel Mark. In many scripts, a mark used to indicate a vowel or vowel quality.
W3C. Acronym for World Wide Web Consortium.

W

wchar_t. The ANSI C defined wide character type, usually implemented as either 16 or 32 bits. ANSI specifies that wchar_t be an integral type and that the C language source character set be mappable by simple extension (zero- or sign-extension).

Writing Direction. The direction or orientation of writing characters within lines of text in a writing system. Three directions are common in modern writing systems: left to right, right to left, and top to bottom.

Writing System. A set of rules for using one or more scripts to write a particular language. Examples include the American English writing system, the British English writing system, the French writing system, and the Japanese writing system.

X-Y

XML. eXtensible Markup Language. A subset of SGML constituting a particular text markup language for interchange of structured data. The Unicode Standard is the reference character set for XML content. (See also SGML and rich text.) XML is a trademark of the World Wide Web Consortium.

Z

Zenkaku. (See fullwidth.)

Zero Width. Characteristic of some spaces or format control characters that do not advance text along the horizontal baseline. (See nonspacing mark.)

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