Unicode Milestones

Unicode has grown from a bold proposal into the world's definitive character encoding standard over the course of thirty-five years. Tracing its version history is tracing the history of how the world's writing systems were brought into the digital era, one block of characters at a time.

Unicode 1.0 (1991): The Beginning

The Unicode Standard Version 1.0 was published in October 1991 as a two-volume set by Addison-Wesley. It encoded 7,161 characters — a deliberately modest starting point.

The initial repertoire included: - Basic Latin and Latin Extended characters (from ASCII and ISO 8859) - Greek, Cyrillic, Hebrew, Arabic, Devanagari, Bengali, Gurmukhi, Gujarati, Oriya, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam, Thai - The CJK unified ideographs (originally 20,902 characters in the initial CJK block) - General punctuation, mathematical operators, geometric shapes, and technical symbols

Version 1.1 (1993) increased the total to 34,168 characters, primarily by adding Hangul (Korean syllables) and more CJK characters, in coordination with ISO 10646-1:1993.

Unicode 2.0 (1996): Surrogates and Supplementary Planes

The original Unicode design was 16-bit: 65,536 possible code points. By the mid-1990s, it was becoming clear that 65,536 characters would not be sufficient, particularly for historic scripts and the full repertoire of CJK ideographs.

Unicode 2.0 introduced the surrogate mechanism: 2,048 code points (0xD800–0xDFFF) were permanently reserved as surrogates, to be used in pairs in UTF-16 encoding to access 1,048,576 additional code points beyond the Basic Multilingual Plane (BMP). This created the current Unicode architecture of 17 planes, 0 through 16, with a total capacity of 1,114,112 code points.

Unicode 2.0 encoded 38,885 characters and introduced UTF-16 as a standard encoding form alongside the 16-bit UCS-2.

Unicode 3.0 (1999): Entering the Supplementary Planes

Unicode 3.0, published in September 1999, was the first version to actually assign characters in supplementary planes beyond the BMP. It encoded 49,194 characters total.

New additions included: - Ethiopic and Cherokee scripts - Unified Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics - Ogham and Runic (the first major historical/medieval script additions) - Sinhala, Tibetan, Mongolian

Unicode 3.0 also introduced the formal UTF-8 and UTF-32 encoding forms, alongside the existing UTF-16.

Unicode 5.2 (2009): Ancient Scripts Flourish

By version 5.2, Unicode had grown to 107,361 characters, crossing the 100,000-character threshold. The major additions were ancient and historical scripts:

• Old South Arabian and Imperial Aramaic
• Bamum (a script invented in 1896 in what is now Cameroon)
• Javanese and Samaritan
• Mahjong Tiles and Domino Tiles (supplementary symbols)
• Mandaic (the liturgical language of the Mandaean religious community)

The inclusion of Bamum was notable — a 19th-century invented script for a living African language, demonstrating Unicode's commitment to scripts beyond the ancient canon.

Unicode 6.0 (2010): Emoji Arrive

Unicode 6.0, published in October 2010, was a watershed moment: it incorporated 722 emoji from Japanese carrier standards (NTT DoCoMo, KDDI, and SoftBank), bringing them into the universal standard for the first time.

This decision was driven by practical interoperability: Japanese phone users were sending emoji between carriers and internationally, but each carrier had its own encoding. By encoding emoji in Unicode, the standard made them portable across systems and platforms.

Unicode 6.0 also added: - Mandaic script - Batak (a script used in Sumatra, Indonesia) - Additional currency symbols including the Indian Rupee Sign (₹)

The total character count reached 110,181.

Unicode 8.0 (2015): Skin Tone Modifiers

Unicode 8.0 introduced emoji modifier sequences using the Fitzpatrick skin tone scale — five modifiers that could be combined with human-form emoji to produce five distinct skin tones plus the default yellow/cartoonish form.

This was technically and socially significant. The Unicode Consortium had faced criticism that the default yellow human emoji were racially coded. The modifier system provided a standards-compliant mechanism for diversity without encoding each skin-tone variant as a separate character.

Unicode 8.0 also added the Caucasian Albanian script (an extinct script of the South Caucasus), Nabataean (an ancient Semitic script), and Old Permic (a medieval script used for the Komi language in Russia). Total: 120,737 characters.

Unicode 13.0 (2020): The Pandemic Emoji

Unicode 13.0, published in March 2020 — as the COVID-19 pandemic was just beginning — included several emoji that took on unexpected resonance: the anatomical heart (🫀), lungs (🫁), and a face with medical mask. The smiling face with tear (🥲) also debuted, capturing an emotion that would define much of the following year.

Technical additions included the Chorasmian script (a medieval Iranian script), Dives Akuru (a historical Maldivian script), and Yezidi (a script used by the Yazidi people of northern Iraq). Total: 143,859 characters.

Unicode 15.0 and 15.1 (2022–2023): Recent Growth

Unicode 15.0 (September 2022) reached 149,186 characters, adding the Kawi script (a medieval script used in insular Southeast Asia), Nag Mundari (a script for the Mundari language of India), and significant CJK Extension J expansion.

Unicode 15.1 (September 2023) was unusual — a minor release focused on significant CJK additions without changing the version numbering for script blocks. It brought the total to 149,813 characters.

Unicode 16.0 (2024): Current State

Unicode 16.0, published in September 2024, encodes 154,998 characters across 168 script blocks. New additions include the Garay script (a recently created script for Wolof, a major language of Senegal), Gurung Khema (Nepal), and Kirat Rai (Nepal), alongside emoji additions and additional CJK characters.

The growth from 7,161 characters in 1991 to 154,998 in 2024 reflects thirty-three years of systematic effort to bring the world's writing heritage into the digital standard — from extinct Bronze Age scripts to newly created community orthographies, from ancient mathematical notations to the face-with-spiral-eyes emoji.