Fun Unicode Facts and Easter Eggs

Unicode is, at its core, a technical standard — a database of characters with assigned properties, carefully maintained by a committee of engineers. But within its 154,998 characters and thousands of pages of documentation, there are moments of humor, historical accident, cultural specificity, and genuine wonder. Here are some of the most entertaining facts about Unicode.

The Longest Character Name

Unicode names can be surprisingly descriptive. Some of the longest names include:

• LATIN SMALL LETTER DOTLESS J WITH STROKE AND HOOK (U+0284) — 46 characters
• COMBINING LATIN SMALL LETTER A and similar combining characters have descriptive but manageable names

The winner for sheer verbosity depends on how you count, but the Cuneiform and CJK extension blocks contain characters with highly specific historical or linguistic descriptions that can run long in their annotations.

Emoji descriptions sometimes read like poetry: SMILING FACE WITH OPEN HANDS (U+1FAF6), FACE HOLDING BACK TEARS (U+1F979), DOTTED LINE FACE (U+1FAE5).

The Snowman (U+2603)

The SNOWMAN character, U+2603 (☃), has become an informal mascot for Unicode testing and internationalization. Because it is a non-ASCII character in the BMP, it is easy to type (as a Unicode escape), recognizable, and unlikely to appear in real data. Developers use it as a "canary" — inserting a snowman into test data to verify that a system correctly handles non-ASCII characters throughout a pipeline.

The snowman is also used to test font rendering and character width calculations. A system that displays "☃" correctly is almost certainly handling Unicode character properties, font fallback, and display correctly. A system that shows "?" or a mojibake sequence at that position has a problem.

A variant, SNOWMAN WITHOUT SNOW (U+26C4, ⛄), was added later. Unicode has several snow-related characters: SNOWFLAKE (U+2744, ❄), SNOWMAN WITHOUT SNOW, and various weather symbols.

The Most Famous Emoji: The Pile of Poo

PILE OF POO (U+1F4A9, 💩) is one of Unicode's most recognized characters and has a surprisingly dignified history. It originated in Japanese carrier emoji sets, where it represented not just excrement but also good luck (the Japanese word for poop, unko, sounds similar to unkô, meaning "good luck"). The swirl on top and the smiling face are part of the traditional Japanese design.

When the Unicode Consortium was deciding which Japanese emoji to encode in Unicode 6.0, there was reportedly no debate about including 💩. It was widely used, distinctively recognizable, and culturally meaningful. It has since become one of the most frequently used emoji globally, appearing in comedy, informal communication, and even corporate marketing campaigns.

The Replacement Character: Unicode's Error Marker

REPLACEMENT CHARACTER (U+FFFD, ) is the character you see when a decoder encounters bytes that do not form valid characters in the expected encoding. It looks like a diamond with a question mark inside.

It is technically the "last resort" character — Unicode's way of saying "something was here but we couldn't decode it." Every robust Unicode-aware application should display U+FFFD rather than crashing or silently dropping data when encountering invalid sequences.

The replacement character has also become a cultural marker: its appearance in text is a clear sign of an encoding error, immediately recognizable to developers. Its HTML entity is �.

The Interrobang

The INTERROBANG (U+203D, ‽) is a typographic experiment from 1962. Advertising executive Martin K. Speckter proposed combining the question mark and exclamation point into a single glyph for rhetorical questions and expressions of excitement and disbelief: "You did what‽"

Speckter ran a contest to name the new punctuation. "Interrobang" won — from "interrogation" and "bang" (printers' slang for the exclamation mark). The character was briefly available on some 1960s Remington typewriters, but never entered mainstream use.

Unicode includes it, along with the REVERSED INTERROBANG (U+2E18, ⸘) used at the start of questions in some typographic traditions. Neither is widely supported in fonts.

The Unicode Block of Fake TV Noise

The BLOCK ELEMENTS (U+2580–U+259F) and BRAILLE PATTERNS (U+2800–U+28FF) blocks are beloved by terminal art enthusiasts. But Unicode 13.0 added something even more specialized: SYMBOLS FOR LEGACY COMPUTING (U+1FB00–U+1FBFF), which includes characters for reproducing graphics from the Commodore 64, ZX Spectrum, and other vintage computers.

This block contains characters like UPPER LEFT ONE THIRD BLOCK and LIGHT SHADE MEDIUM SHADE — graphics primitives that were burned into 1980s ROM chips and used to draw games, user interfaces, and art on 40-column text screens. Their inclusion in Unicode 13.0 was championed by developers of terminal emulators who wanted to faithfully reproduce vintage computer output in modern terminal applications.

U+1F32D: The Hot Dog Did Not Pass

The HOT DOG emoji (🌭, U+1F32D) passed its proposal. But many proposed emoji have been rejected for reasons that reveal the careful (and sometimes surprising) logic of the Emoji Subcommittee.

A proposal for a PIÑATA emoji was initially deferred as too culturally specific — and then approved in Unicode 13.0. TAMALE (🫔) was approved in Unicode 14.0. A proposal for a MOOSE emoji took multiple attempts before being approved in Unicode 15.0 as 🫎.

The Emoji Subcommittee has explicitly rejected emoji for: specific corporate logos, the face of specific religious figures, and characters that the committee considered memes rather than durable communication symbols (a policy that has been applied inconsistently, given that several emoji became major internet memes after their encoding).

The Private Use Areas

Unicode reserves three ranges as Private Use Areas (PUA): U+E000–U+F8FF (6,400 code points in the BMP) and two supplementary plane blocks (U+F0000–U+FFFFF and U+100000–U+10FFFF, totaling 131,068 code points).

PUA code points have no standardized meaning — they are available for private agreements between parties. Apple uses PUA code points for its proprietary symbols (the Apple logo at U+F8FF is the most famous). Gaming fonts use PUA to encode custom icons. The Wingdings font family maps PUA code points to decorative symbols.

Because PUA code points have no universal meaning, a document using them is only interpretable with the specific font or agreement under which it was created. A U+F8FF in a document viewed without an Apple font will display as a generic box or nothing at all.

Unicode in Space

The Voyager Golden Records, launched in 1977, predate Unicode by 14 years. But modern spacecraft communicate via protocols that use ASCII and increasingly UTF-8.

The Mars rovers have transmitted data that includes UTF-8 text in telemetry and scientific label fields. NASA's Deep Space Network documentation uses Unicode characters in its technical specifications. When humanity eventually encounters other intelligent life (or vice versa), the first mathematical encoding system we would need to explain would likely be Unicode — the system through which we have organized all of our written symbols.

The Character That Broke Twitter

In 2009, a researcher discovered that the Arabic letter combination لا (U+0644 U+0627 — Lam + Alef, which forms a mandatory ligature in Arabic rendering) could, when combined with certain right-to-left override characters, cause rendering failures in Twitter's web interface. The post went mildly viral among security researchers.

This was an instance of a broader class of Unicode rendering quirks related to bidirectional text and mandatory ligatures. The RIGHT-TO-LEFT OVERRIDE character (U+202E) has been used in numerous social engineering attacks to disguise filenames — for example, making innocentEXE.txt appear as txt.EXEtneconi in displays that render Unicode bidirectional control characters.

Unicode is, at its most fundamental, a map of human expression — and human expression includes jokes, accidents, historical curiosities, and the occasional security vulnerability. The standard is a living document of our species' written heritage, complete with all its strangeness.