UTF-16

UTF-16 (16-bit Unicode Transformation Format) is a character encoding capable of encoding all 1,112,064 possible characters in Unicode. The encoding is variable-length, as code points are encoded with one or two 16-bit code units. (also see Comparison of Unicode encodings for a comparison of UTF-8, -16 & -32)

UTF-16 developed from an earlier fixed-width 16-bit encoding known as UCS-2 (for 2-byte Universal Character Set) once it became clear that a fixed-width 2-byte encoding could not encode enough characters to be truly universal.

History

In the late 1980s, work began on developing a uniform encoding for a "Universal Character Set" (UCS) that would replace earlier language-specific encodings with one coordinated system. The goal was to include all required characters from most of the world's languages, as well as symbols from technical domains such as science, mathematics, and music. The original idea was to expand the typical 256-character encodings requiring 1 byte per character with an encoding using 2¹⁶ = 65,536 values requiring 2 bytes per character. Two groups worked on this in parallel, the IEEE and the Unicode Consortium, the latter representing mostly manufacturers of computing equipment. The two groups attempted to synchronize their character assignments, so that the developing encodings would be mutually compatible. The early 2-byte encoding was usually called "Unicode", but is now called "UCS-2".