How many characters are there?

Here’s what I found.

Photo by Jeremy Zero

Count

143,859.¹

Full table: https://unicode-table.com/en/#basic-latin

Methodology

This short article assumes that by now, every useful/usable/commonly-used character has been encoded and added to the unicode standard.

This is not necessarily the case. In fact, “Unicode standard doesn’t freeze, it continues to evolve.”²

Definitions

Character (computing): In computer and machine-based telecommunications terminology, a character is a unit of information that roughly corresponds to a grapheme, grapheme-like unit, or symbol, such as in an alphabet or syllabary in the written form of a natural language.³

Unicode is an information technology standard for the consistent encoding, representation, and handling of text expressed in most of the world’s writing systems.

[1] https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Character_(computing)

[2] https://unicode-table.com/en/#supplementary-private-use-area-b

[3] https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Unicode