Block Explorer

The Basic Latin block (U+0000–U+007F) is the first Unicode block and covers the 128 original ASCII characters, including the English alphabet, digits, punctuation, and control characters. This deep dive explores every character in the Basic Latin block, its history, and its role as the foundation of all text encoding.

The Latin-1 Supplement block (U+0080–U+00FF) extends ASCII with accented Latin characters for Western European languages and matches the original ISO 8859-1 encoding. This guide explores the characters in the Latin-1 Supplement, their linguistic uses, and why this block is important for European language support.

The General Punctuation block (U+2000–U+206F) contains typographic spaces, dashes, quotation marks, and various punctuation characters used in professional typography across many languages. This guide explores every character group in the General Punctuation block with usage context and copy-paste support.

The Mathematical Operators block (U+2200–U+22FF) contains 256 symbols covering set theory, logic, calculus, and other areas of mathematics used in academic papers and technical documentation. This guide explores the block's character groups, provides LaTeX equivalents, and shows how to use these symbols in HTML and code.

The Arrows block (U+2190–U+21FF) contains 112 arrow characters including simple directional arrows, double-headed arrows, curved arrows, and arrows with various styles. This deep dive explores every arrow in the block, its intended use, and how it relates to other Unicode arrow characters scattered across other blocks.

The Dingbats block (U+2700–U+27BF) was created to encode the Zapf Dingbats typeface and contains 192 decorative ornaments, check marks, arrows, and other typographic embellishments. This guide explores every character group in the Dingbats block with historical context and copy-paste support.

The Miscellaneous Symbols block (U+2600–U+26FF) is one of Unicode's most eclectic, containing weather symbols, card suits, zodiac signs, religious symbols, game pieces, and many other standalone symbols. This guide explores the block's diverse contents with copy-paste support and context for each symbol group.

The CJK Unified Ideographs block (U+4E00–U+9FFF) is one of the largest Unicode blocks, containing over 20,000 Chinese, Japanese, and Korean characters unified into a single set. This guide explains the CJK unification process, the structure of the block, and how to work with CJK characters in software applications.

The Hangul Syllables block (U+AC00–U+D7A3) contains 11,172 precomposed Korean syllable blocks algorithmically derived from 19 initial consonants, 21 vowels, and 28 final consonants. This guide explains the structure of Korean Hangul in Unicode, how syllable composition works, and how to handle Korean text in software.

Emoji in Unicode span multiple blocks across the Supplementary Multilingual Plane, including Emoticons, Miscellaneous Symbols and Pictographs, and Transport and Map Symbols, with sequences using ZWJ and variation selectors. This guide maps out where emoji live in Unicode, how sequences work, and how emoji are updated in each Unicode version.

The Currency Symbols block (U+20A0–U+20CF) contains dedicated Unicode characters for currencies that lack an ASCII representation, such as the Euro €, Rupee ₹, and Bitcoin ₿. This guide explores every character in the Currency Symbols block and explains which modern currencies still lack a dedicated Unicode character.

The Box Drawing block (U+2500–U+257F) and Block Elements block (U+2580–U+259F) provide characters for drawing text-based user interfaces and terminal art in monospaced fonts. This guide explores both blocks, explains how their characters combine to form borders and bar charts, and provides a complete reference.

The Enclosed Alphanumerics block (U+2460–U+24FF) contains circled numbers, parenthesized numbers and letters, and various other enclosed alphanumeric forms used in lists, maps, and annotation. This guide explores the block's contents with copy-paste support and notes on how these characters interact with font rendering.

The Geometric Shapes block (U+25A0–U+25FF) and related blocks contain squares, circles, triangles, and other polygons in filled, outlined, and partial forms for use in text, UI, and decoration. This guide explores the geometric shape blocks, their character variants, and copy-paste support for every character.

The Musical Symbols block (U+1D100–U+1D1FF) is a Supplementary Multilingual Plane block containing 233 characters for full western music notation, including staves, clefs, notes, rests, and dynamics. This guide explores the Musical Symbols block, its intended use for music typography, and the font support challenges it presents.