Unicode Glossary
Abstract
Character. A unit of information used for the
organization, control, or representation of textual data. (See
Definition D3 in Section 3.3,
Characters and Coded Representations .)
Accent Mark.
A mark placed above, below, or to the side of a character to
alter its phonetic value. (See also diacritic.)
Alphabet. A collection of
symbols that, in the context of a particular written language,
represent the sounds of that language. The correspondence
between symbols and sounds may be either more or less exact;
most alphabets do not exhibit a one-to-one correspondence
between distinct sounds (phonemes) and
distinct symbols (graphemes).
Alphabetic Property.
Informative property of the primary units of alphabets and/or
syllabaries. (See Section 4.10,
Letters and Other Useful Properties .)
Alphabetic Sorting.
(See collation.)
Annotation. The association
of secondary textual content with a point or range of the
primary text. (The value of a particular annotation is considered
to be a part of the "content" of the text. Typical
examples include glossing, citations, exemplification, Japanese
yomi, etc.)
ANSI. (1) The American National
Standards Institute. (2) The Microsoft collective name for all
Windows code pages. Sometimes used specifically for code page
1252, which is a superset of ISO/IEC 8859-1.
Arabic Digits. Forms of
decimal digits used in most parts of the Arabic world (for
instance, U+0660, U+0661, U+0662, U+0663). Although European digits (1, 2, 3...)
derive historically from these forms, they are visually distinct
and are coded separately. (Arabic digits are sometimes called
Indic numerals; however, this nomenclature leads to confusion
with the digits currently used with the scripts of India.)
Arabic digits are referred to as Arabic-Indic digits in
the Unicode Standard. Variant forms of Arabic digits used
chiefly in Iran and Pakistan are referred to as Eastern
Arabic-Indic digits.
ASCII. Acronym for American
Standard Code for Information Interchange, a 7-bit code that is
the U.S. national variant of ISO/IEC 646. Formally, the U.S.
standard ANSI X3.4.
Assigned Character.
Synonym for encoded character.
Assigned Code Point.
A code point that has defined, interoperable semantics.
Base Character. A
character that does not graphically combine with preceding
characters, and that is neither a control nor a format
character. (See Definition D13 in Section 3.5,
Combination .)
Basic Multilingual
Plane. Plane 0, abbreviated as BMP.
Bicameral. A script that has
case distinctions. Most often used
in the context of European alphabets.
BIDI. Abbreviation of
bidirectional, in reference to mixed left-to-right and
right-to-left text.
Bidirectional Display.
The process or result of mixing left-to-right oriented text and
right-to-left oriented text in a single line. (See Section 3.12, Bidirectional Behavior
.)
Big-endian. A computer
architecture that stores multiple-byte numerical values with the
most significant byte (MSB) values first.
Binary Files. Files
containing nontextual information.
Block. A grouping of related
characters within the Unicode encoding space. A block may
contain unassigned positions, which are reserved.
BMP. Abbreviation for Basic Multilingual Plane.
BMP Code Point. A
Unicode code point between U+0000 and U+FFFF. See supplementary code point.
BMP Character. A Unicode
encoded character having a BMP code point. See supplementary character.
BNF. Abbreviation for Backus-Naur
Form, a formal meta-syntax for describing content-free
syntaxes. (For details, see Section 0.2,
Notational Conventions.)
BOM. Acronym for byte order mark.
Bopomofo. An alphabetic script used primarily in the
Republic of China (Taiwan) to write the sounds of Mandarin
Chinese and some other dialects. Each symbol corresponds to
either the syllable initial or syllable final sounds; it is
therefore a subsyllabic script in its primary usage. The name is
derived from the names of its first four elements. More properly
known as zhuyin zimu or zhuyin fuhao (in
Mandarin Chinese).
Boustrophedon. A pattern
of writing seen in some ancient manuscripts and inscriptions,
where alternate lines of text are laid out in opposite
directions, and where right-to-left lines generally use glyphs
mirrored from their left-to-right forms. Literally, "as the
ox turns," referring to the plowing of a field.
Braille. A writing system
using a series of raised dots to be read with the fingers by
people who are blind or whose eyesight is not sufficient for
reading printed material. (See Section 12.9,
Braille .)
Braille Pattern. One
of the 64 (for 6-dot Braille) or 256 (for 8-dot Braille)
possible tangible dot combinations.
Byte Order Mark. The
Unicode character U+FEFF ZERO WIDTH NO-BREAK SPACE when used to
indicate the byte order of a text. (See Section 2.7,
Special Character and Noncharacter Values , and Section 13.6, Specials .)
Byte Serialization.
The order of a series of bytes determined by a computer
architecture.
Byte-Swapped. Reversal of
the order of a sequence of bytes.
Canonical. (1) Conforming to
the general rules for encoding--that is, not compressed,
compacted, or in any other form specified by a higher protocol.
(2) Characteristic of a normative mapping and form of
equivalence specified in Chapter 3,
Conformance .
Canonical Decomposition.
See Definition D23 in Section 3.6,
Decomposition .
Canonical Equivalent.
Two character sequences are said to be canonical equivalents if
their full canonical decompositions are identical. (See
Definition D24 in Section 3.6,
Decomposition .)
Cantillation Mark. A
mark that is used to indicate how a text is to be chanted or
sung.
Capital. Synonym for
uppercase. (See case.)
Case. (1) Feature of certain
alphabets where the letters have two distinct forms. These
variants, which may differ markedly in shape and size, are
called the uppercase letter (also known as capital
or majuscule) and the lowercase letter (also
known as small or minuscule). (2) Normative
property of characters, consisting of uppercase, lowercase, and
titlecase (Lu, Ll, and Lt). (See Section 4.1,
Case--Normative .)
Case Mapping. The
association of the uppercase, lowercase, and titlecase forms of
a letter. (See Section 5.18, Case
Mappings .)
Cedilla. A mark originally
placed beneath the letter c in French, Portuguese, and
Spanish to indicate that the letter is to be pronounced as an s,
as in façade. Obsolete Spanish diminutive of ceda, the letter z.
Character. (1) The smallest
component of written language that has semantic value; refers to
the abstract meaning and/or shape, rather than a specific shape
(see also glyph), though in code tables some form of
visual representation is essential for the reader's
understanding. (2) Synonym for abstract
character. (See Definition D3 in Section 3.3,
Characters and Coded Representations .) (3) The basic unit
of encoding for the Unicode character encoding. (4) The English
name for the ideographic written elements of Chinese origin.
(See ideograph (2).)
Character Block. (See block.)
Character Class. A set
of characters sharing a particular set of properties.
Character Encoding Form.
Mapping from a character set definition to the actual code units
used to represent the data.
Character Encoding
Scheme. A character
encoding form plus byte serialization. There are seven
character encoding schemes in Unicode: UTF-8, UTF-16, UTF-16BE,
UTF-16LE, UTF-32, UTF-32BE and UTF-32LE.
Character Properties.
A set of property names and property values associated with
individual characters (See Chapter 4,
Character Properties.)
Character Repertoire.
The collection of characters included in a character set.
Character Sequence.
See Definitions D4 (abstract
character sequence) and D7 (coded character sequence)
in Section 3.3, Characters and Coded
Representations .
Character Set. A
collection of elements used to represent textual information.
Chu Hán. The name for Han
characters used in Vietnam; derived from Hanzi.
Chu Nôm. A demotic script of
Vietnam developed from components of Han characters. Its
creators used methods similar to those used by the Chinese in
creating Han characters.
CJK. Abbreviation for Chinese,
Japanese, and Korean. A variant, CJKV, means Chinese,
Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese.
Coded Character
Representation. An ordered sequence of one or more code
units that is associated with an abstract character in a given character repertoire. (See
Definition D6 in Section 3.3,
Characters and Coded Representations .)
Coded Character
Sequence. An ordered sequence of coded character
representations. (See Definition D7 in Section 3.3,
Characters and Coded Representations .)
Coded Character Set.
A character set in which each character is assigned a numeric
code point. Frequently abbreviated as character set, charset, or
code set.
Code Page. A coded character
set, often referring to a coded character set used by a personal
computer--for example, PC code page 437, the default coded
character set used by the U.S. English version of the DOS
operating system.
Code Point. (1) A numerical
index (or position) in an encoding table used for encoding
characters. (2) Synonym for Unicode
scalar value.
Code Position. Synonym for
code point. Used in ISO
character encoding standards.
Codespace. A range of
numerical values available for encoding characters.
Code Unit. The minimal bit
combination that can represent a unit of encoded text for
processing or interchange. (See Definition D5 in Section 3.3, Characters and Coded
Representations .)
Code Value. Synonym for code unit.
Collation. The process of
ordering units of textual information. Collation is usually
specific to a particular language. Also known as alphabetizing
or alphabetic sorting.
Unicode Technical Report #10,
"Unicode Collation Algorithm," defines a complete,
unambiguous, specified ordering for all characters in the
Unicode Standard.
Combining Character.
A character that graphically combines with a preceding base
character. The combining character is said to apply to
that base character. (See Definition D14 in Section 3.5,
Combination .) (See also nonspacing
mark.)
Combining
Character Sequence. (See Definition D17 in Section 3.5, Combination .)
Combining Class. A
numeric value given to each combining Unicode character that
determines which other combining
characters it typographically interacts with. (See
Definition D37 in Section 3.10,
Canonical Ordering Behavior .)
Compatibility. (1)
Consistency with existing practice or preexisting character
encoding standards. (2) Characteristic of a normative mapping
and form of equivalence specified in Section 3.6,
Decomposition .
Compatibility Character.
(1) A character encoded only for compatibility with preexisting
character encoding standards to support transcoding.
(2) A character that has a compatibility decomposition. (See
Definition D21 in Section 3.6,
Decomposition .)
Compatibility
Decomposition. (See Definition D20 in Section 3.6, Decomposition .)
Compatibility
Equivalent. Two character sequences are said to be
compatibility equivalents if their full compatibility
decompositions are identical. (See Definition D22 in Section 3.6, Decomposition .)
Compatibility Variant.
A character that generally can be remapped to another character
without loss of information other than formatting.
Composed Character
Sequence. (See Definition D17 in Section 3.5,
Combination .)
Composite Character.
(See decomposable
character.)
Composite
Character Sequence. (See combining character
sequence.)
Conformance. Adherence to
a specified set of criteria for use of a standard. (See Chapter 3, Conformance .)
Conjunct Form. A type of
ligature that appears in most scripts based on the Brahmi family
of Indic scripts. (See Section 9.1,
Devanagari .)
Consonant Cluster. A
sequence of characters that represents one or more consonants.
Consonant Conjunct.
Typically, a ligated presentation form of a consonant cluster.
This term is mostly applied to Brahmi-derived (Indic) scripts.
Contextual Variant.
A text element can have a presentation form that depends upon
textual context in which it is rendered. This presentation form
is known as a contextual variant.
Control Codes. The 65
characters in the ranges U+0000..U+001F and U+007F..U+009F. Also
known as control characters.
Cursive. Writing where the
letters of a word are connected.
DBCS. Abbreviation for double-byte character set.
Dead Consonant. An
Indic consonant character followed by a virama
character. This sequence indicates that the consonant has lost
its inherent vowel. (See Section 9.1,
Devanagari .)
Decimal Digits. Digits
that can be used to form decimal-radix numbers.
Decomposable Character.
A character that is equivalent to a sequence of one or more
other characters, according to the decomposition mappings found
in the names list of Section 14.1,
Character Names List . It may also be known as a
precomposed character or a composite character.
(See Definition D18 in Section 3.6,
Decomposition .)
Decomposition. (1) The
process of separating or analyzing a text element into component
units. These component units may not have any functional status,
but may be simply formal units--that is, abstract shapes. (2)
(See Definition D19 in Section 3.6,
Decomposition .)
Defective
Combining Character Sequence. A combining character
sequence that does not start with a base character. (See
Definition D17a in Section 3.5,
Combination .)
Demotic Script. (1) A
script or a form of a script used to write the vernacular or
common speech of some language community. (2) A simplified form
of the ancient Egyptian hieratic writing.
Dependent Vowel. A
symbol or sign that represents a vowel and that is attached or
combined with another symbol, usually one that represents a
consonant. For example, in writing systems based on Arabic,
Hebrew, and Indic scripts, vowels are normally represented as
dependent vowel signs.
Deprecated. A coded
character whose use is strongly discouraged. Such characters are
retained in the standard, but should not be used. (See
Definition D7a in Section 3.3,
Characters and Coded Representations .) (Not the same as obsolete.)
Diacritic. (1) A mark
applied or attached to a symbol to create a new symbol that
represents a modified or new value. (2) A mark applied to a
symbol irrespective of whether it changes the value of that
symbol. In the latter case, the diacritic usually represents an
independent value (for example, an accent, tone, or some other
linguistic information). Also called diacritical mark
or diacritical. (See also combining character and nonspacing mark.)
Diaeresis. Two horizontal
dots over a letter, as in naïve. The diaeresis is not
distinguished from the umlaut in
the Unicode character encoding. (See umlaut.)
Digits. (See Arabic digits, European digits, and Indic digits.)
Digraph. A pair of signs or
symbols (two graphs), which together represent a single sound or
a single linguistic unit. The English writing system employs
many digraphs (for example, th, ch, sh, qu,
and so on). The same two symbols may not always be
interpreted as a digraph (for example, cathode
versus cathouse). When three signs are so
combined, they are called a trigraph. More than three are
usually called an n-graph.
Dingbats. Typographical
symbols and ornaments.
Diphthong. A pair of vowels
that are considered a single vowel for the purpose of phonemic
distinction. One of the two vowels is more prominent than the
other. In writing systems, diphthongs are sometimes written with
one symbol, and sometimes with more than one symbol (for
example, with a digraph).
Directionality Property.
A property of every graphic character that determines its
horizontal ordering as specified in Section 3.12,
Bidirectional Behavior . (See Definition D9 in Section 3.4, Simple Properties .)
Display Cell. A
rectangular region on a display device within which one or more
glyphs are imaged.
Display Order. The order
of glyphs presented in text rendering.
Double-Byte Character
Set. One of a number of character sets defined for
representing Chinese, Japanese, or Korean text (for example, JIS
X 0208-1990). These character sets are often encoded in such a
way as to allow double-byte character encodings to be mixed with
single-byte character encodings. Abbreviated DBCS.
(See also multibyte
character set.)
Ductility. The ability of a
cursive font to stretch or compress the connective baseline to
effect text justification.
Dynamic Composition.
Creation of composite forms such as accented letters or Hangul syllables from a sequence of
characters.
EBCDIC. Acronym for Extended
Binary-Coded Decimal Interchange Code. A group of coded
character sets used on mainframes that consist of 8-bit coded
characters. EBCDIC coded character sets reserve the first 64
code positions (x00 to x3F) for control codes, and reserve the
range x41 to xFE for graphic characters. The English alphabetic
characters are in discontinuous segments with uppercase at xC1
to xC9, xD1 to xD9, xE2 to xE9, and lowercase at x81 to x89, x91
to x99, xA2 to xA9.
Encapsulated Text.
(1) Plain text surrounded by formatting information. (2) Text
recoded to pass through narrow transmission channels or to match
communication protocols.
Encoded Character.
An abstract character together with its associated Unicode
scalar value (code point). By itself, an abstract character
has no numerical value, but the process of "encoding a
character" associates a particular Unicode scalar value
with a particular abstract character, thereby resulting in an
"encoded character."
Encoding Form. (See character encoding form.)
Encoding Scheme. (See character encoding scheme.)
Equivalence. In the
context of text processing, the process or result of
establishing whether two text elements are identical in some
respect.
Equivalent Sequence.
(See canonical equivalent.)
Escape Sequence. A
sequence of bytes that is used for code extension. The first
byte in the sequence is escape (hex 1B).
European Digits. Forms
of decimal digits first used in Europe and now used worldwide.
Historically, these digits were derived from the Arabic digits;
they are sometimes called "Arabic numerals," but this
nomenclature leads to confusion with the real Arabic digits.
Fancy Text. Also known as rich text. The result of adding
additional information to plain text. Examples of information
that can be added include font data, color, formatting
information, phonetic annotations, interlinear text, and so on.
The Unicode Standard does not address the representation of
fancy text. It is expected that systems and applications will
implement proprietary forms of fancy text. Some public forms of
fancy text are available (for example, ODA, HTML,
and SGML). When everything but primary
content is removed from fancy text, only plain text should
remain.
Floating
(diacritic, accent, mark). (See nonspacing mark.)
Font. A collection of glyphs used
for the visual depiction of character data. A font is often
associated with a set of parameters (for example, size, posture,
weight, and serifness), which, when set to particular values,
generate a collection of imagable glyphs.
Formatted Text. (See fancy text.)
Formatting Codes.
Characters that are inherently invisible but that have an effect
on the surrounding characters.
FSS-UTF. Abbreviation for File
System Safe UCS Transformation Format,
published by the X/Open Company Ltd., and intended for the UNIX
environment. Now known as UTF-8.
Fullwidth. Characters of
East Asian character sets whose glyph image extends across the
entire character display cell. In legacy character sets,
fullwidth characters are normally encoded in two or three bytes.
The Japanese term for fullwidth characters is zenkaku.
GCGID. Acronym for Graphic
Character Global Identifier. These are listed in the IBM
document Character Data Representation Architecture, Level
1, Registry SC09-1391.
General Category. Partition
of the characters into major classes such as letters,
punctuation, and symbols, and further subclasses for each of the
major classes. (See Section 4.5,
General Category--Normative in Part .)
Glyph. (1) An abstract form that
represents one or more glyph images. (2) A synonym for glyph
image. In displaying Unicode character data, one or more
glyphs may be selected to depict a particular character. These
glyphs are selected by a rendering engine during composition and
layout processing. (See also character.)
Glyph Code. A numeric code
that refers to a glyph. Usually, the glyphs contained in a font
are referenced by their glyph code. Glyph codes may be local to
a particular font; that is, a different font containing the same
glyphs may use different codes.
Glyph Identifier.
Similar to a glyph code, a glyph identifier is a label used to
refer to a glyph within a font. A font may employ both local and
global glyph identifiers. A collection of global or universal
glyph identifiers is defined by the Association for Font
Information and Interchange (AFII).
Glyph Image. The actual,
concrete image of a glyph representation having been rasterized
or otherwise imaged onto some display surface.
Glyph Metrics. A
collection of properties that specify the relative size and
positioning along with other features of a glyph.
Grapheme. (1) A minimally
distinctive unit of writing in the context of a particular
writing system. For example, b and d are
distinct graphemes in English writing systems because there
exist distinct words like big and dig. Conversely, a lowercase
italiform letter a and a lowercase Roman letter a are
not distinct graphemes because no word is distinguished on the
basis of these two different forms. A grapheme is for a writing
system what a phoneme is for a phonology. (2) What a user thinks
of as a character.
Graphic Character.
(1) A character typically associated with a visible display
representation. (See also glyph.)
(2) Any character that is not primarily associated with a
control or formatting function.
Guillemet. Punctuation marks
resembling small less-than and greater-than signs, used as
quotation marks in French and other languages. (See
"Language-Based Usage of Quotation Marks" in Section 6.1, General Punctuation .)
Halant. A synonym for the virama character.
It literally means killer, referring to its function of
killing the inherent vowel of a consonant letter. (See virama.)
Half-Consonant Form.
In the Devanagari script, and certain other scripts of the
Brahmi family of Indic scripts, a dead consonant may be depicted
in the so-called half-form. This form is composed of the
distinctive part of a consonant letter symbol without its
vertical stem. It may be used to create conjunct forms that
follow a horizontal layout pattern. Also known as half-form.
Halfwidth. Characters of
East Asian character sets whose glyph image occupies half of the
character display cell. In legacy character sets, halfwidth
characters are normally encoded in a single byte. The Japanese
term for halfwidth characters is hankaku.
Han Characters.
Ideographic characters of Chinese origin. (See Section 10.1, Han .)
Hangul. The name of the script
used to write the Korean language.
Hanja. The Korean name for Han
characters; derived from the Chinese word hanzi.
Hankaku. (See halfwidth.)
Han Unification. The
process of identifying Han characters that are in common among
the writing systems of Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and
Vietnamese.
Hanzi. The Mandarin Chinese name
for Han characters.
Harakat. Marks that indicate
vowels or other modifications of consonant letters in Arabic
script.
Higher-Level Protocol.
Any agreement on the interpretation of Unicode characters that
extends beyond the scope of this standard. Such an agreement
need not be formally announced in data; it may be implicit in
the context. (See Definition D8 in Section 3.3,
Characters and Coded Representations .)
High-Surrogate. A
Unicode code point in the range U+D800 through U+DBFF. (See
Definition D25 in Section 3.7,
Surrogates .)
Hiragana. One of two standard
syllabaries associated with the Japanese writing system.
Hiragana syllables are typically used in representation of
native Japanese words and grammatical particles.
HTML. HyperText Markup Language.
A text description language related to SGML; it mixes text
format markup with plain text content to describe formatted
text. HTML is ubiquitous as the source language for Web pages on
the Internet. Starting with HTML 4.0, the Unicode Standard
functions as the reference character set for HTML content. (See
also SGML.)
IANA. Internet Assigned Numbers
Authority.
Ideograph. (1) Any symbol
that primarily denotes an idea (or meaning) in contrast to a
sound (or pronunciation)--for example, a symbol showing a
telephone. (2) A common term used to refer to Han characters.
Ideographic Property.
Informative property of characters that are ideographs. (See Section 4.10, Letters and Other Useful
Properties .)
Illegal Code Value
Sequence. Synonym for illegal code unit sequence. (See
Definition D31 in Section 3.8,
Transformations .)
Ill-Formed Code
Value Sequence. Synonym for ill-formed code unit
sequence. (See Definition D30 in Section 3.8,
Transformations.)
In-band. An in-band channel
conveys information about text by embedding that information
within the text itself, with special syntax to distinguish it.
In-band information is encoded in the same character set as the
text, and is interspersed with and carried along with the text
data. Examples are XML and HTML markup.
Independent Vowel.
In Indic scripts, certain vowels are depicted using independent
letter symbols that stand on their own. This is often true when
a word starts with a vowel or a word consists only of a vowel.
Indic Digits. Forms of
decimal digits used in various Indic scripts (for example,
Devanagari: U+0966, U+0967, U+0968, U+0969). Arabic digits (and, eventually, European digits) derive historically
from these forms.
Informative. Information
in this standard that is not normative but that contributes to
the correct use and implementation of the standard.
Inherent Vowel. In
writing systems based on a script in the Brahmi family of Indic
scripts, a consonant letter symbol normally has an inherent
vowel, unless otherwise indicated. The phonetic value of this
vowel differs among the various languages written with these
writing systems. An inherent vowel is overridden either by
indicating another vowel with an explicit vowel sign or by using
virama to create a dead
consonant.
Inner Caps. Mixed case
format where an uppercase letter is in a position other than
first in the word--for example, "G" in the Name
"McGowan."
IPA. (1) The International
Phonetic Alphabet. (2) The International Phonetic Association,
which defines and maintains the International Phonetic Alphabet.
IRG. Abbreviation for Ideographic
Rapporteur Group, a subgroup of ISO/IEC JTC1/SC2/WG2.
See Appendix A, Han
Unification History .
Irregular Code
Value Sequence. Synonym for irregular code unit
sequence. (See Definition D32 in Section 3.8,
Transformations .)
ISCII. Acronym for Indian
Standard Code for Information Interchange.
Jamo. The Korean name for a
single letter of the Hangul script. Jamos are used to form Hangul syllables.
Joiner. An invisible character
that affects the joining behavior of surrounding characters.
(See Section 8.2, Arabic , and
"Cursive Connection" in Section 13.2,
Layout Controls .)
JTC1. The Joint Technical
Committee 1 of the International Organization for
Standardization and the International Electrotechnical
Commission responsible for information technology
standardization.
Kana. The name of a primarily
syllabic script used by the Japanese writing system. It comes in
two forms, hiragana and katakana. The former is used to write
particles, grammatical affixes, and words that have no kanji form; the latter is used primarily
to write foreign words.
Kanji. The Japanese name for Han
characters; derived from the Chinese word hanzi.
Also romanized as kanzi.
Katakana. One of two standard
syllabaries associated with the Japanese writing system.
Katakana syllables are typically used in representation of
borrowed vocabulary (other than that of Chinese origin),
sound-symbolic interjections, or phonetic representation of
"difficult" kanji characters in Japanese.
Kerning. (1) Changing the
space between certain pairs of letters to improve the appearance
of the text. (2) Process of mapping from pairs of glyphs to a
positioning offset used to change the space between letters.
Letter. (1) An element of an
alphabet. In a broad sense, includes elements of syllabaries and
ideographs. (2) Informative property of characters that are used
to write words.
Ligature. A glyph
representing a combination of two or more characters. In the
Latin script, there are only a few in modern use, such as the
ligatures between "f" and "i" or
"f and l". Other scripts make use of many ligatures,
depending on the font and style.
Little-endian. A
computer architecture that stores multiple-byte numerical values
with the least significant byte (LSB) values first.
Logical Order. The order
in which text is typed on a keyboard. For the most part, logical
order corresponds to phonetic order. (See Section 2.2,
Unicode Design Principles .)
Logical Store. Memory
representation.
Lowercase. (See case.)
Low-Surrogate. A Unicode
code point in the range U+DC00 through U+DFFF. (See Definition
D26 in Section 3.7, Surrogates .)
LSB. Abbreviation for least
significant byte.
LZW. Abbreviation for Lempel-Ziv-Welch,
a standard algorithm widely used for compression of data.
Majuscule. Synonym for uppercase.
(See case.)
Mathematical Property.
Informative property of characters that are used as operators in
mathematical formulae.
Matra. A dependent vowel in an
Indic script. It is the name for vowel letters that follow
consonant letters in logical order. A matra often has a
completely different letter form from that for the same
phonological vowel used as an independent letter.
MBCS. Abbreviation for multibyte character set.
MIME. Multipurpose Internet Mail
Extensions. MIME is a standard that allows the embedding of
arbitrary documents and other binary data of known types
(images, sound, video, and so on) into e-mail handled by
ordinary Internet electronic mail interchange protocols.
Minuscule. Synonym for
lowercase. (See case.)
Mirrored Property.
The property of characters whose images are mirrored
horizontally in text that is laid out from right to left (versus
left to right). (See Definition D10 in Section 3.4,
Simple Properties .) (See also Section 4.7,
Mirrored--Normative .)
Missing Glyph. (See replacement glyph.)
Modifier Letter. (1)
Lm category in the Unicode Character Database. (2) Collection in
the Modifier Letters block. Look like letters or punctuation and
modify the pronunciation of other letters (similar to
diacritics). (See Section 7.8, Modifier Letters .)
Monotonic. Modern Greek
written with the basic accent, the tonos.
MSB. Abbreviation for most
significant byte.
Multibyte Character Set.
A character set encoded with a variable number of bytes per
character. Many large character sets have been defined as MBCS
so as to keep strict compatibility with the ASCII
subset and/or ISO/IEC 2022. Abbreviated as MBCS.
Nekudot. Marks that indicate
vowels or other modifications of consonantal letters in Hebrew.
Neutral Character. A
character that can be written either right to left or left to
right, depending on context. (See Section 3.12,
Bidirectional Behavior .)
Noncharacter. Unicode
code points that are permanently reserved for internal use, and
that should never be interchanged. These consist of the values
U+nFFFE and U+nFFFF, where n is from 0 to
1016. For more information, see Unicode
3.0.1.
Non-joiner. An invisible
character that affects the joining behavior of surrounding
characters. (See Section 8.2, Arabic
, and "Cursive Connection" in Section 13.2,
Layout Controls .)
Nonspacing Diacritic.
A diacritic that is a nonspacing mark.
Nonspacing Mark. A combining character whose
positioning in presentation is dependent on its base character.
It generally does not consume space along the visual baseline in
and of itself. (See Definition D15 in Section 3.5,
Combination .) (See also combining
character.)
Normalization.
Transformation of data to a normal form--for example, to unify
spelling. (See Section 5.7,
Normalization .)
Normative. Required for
conformance with the Unicode Standard.
NSM. Abbreviation for nonspacing mark.
Numeric Value Property.
A property of characters used to represent numbers. (See
Definition D10b in Section 3.4, Simple
Properties .)
Out-of-band. An out-of-band
channel conveys additional information about text in such a way
that the textual content, as encoded, is completely untouched
and unmodified. This is typically done by separate data
structures that point into the text.
Obsolete. Applies to a
character no longer in current use, but which has been used
historically. Whether a character is obsolete depends on
context: for example, the Cyrillic letter big yus is obsolete
for Russian, but is used in modern Bulgarian. (Not the same as deprecated.)
Phoneme. A minimally distinct
sound in the context of a particular spoken language. For
example, in American English, /p/ and /b/ are distinct phonemes
because pat and bat are distinct; however, the two different
sounds of /t/ in tick and stick are not distinct in English,
even though they are distinct in other languages such as Thai.
Pinyin. Standard system for the
romanization of Chinese on the basis of Mandarin pronunciation.
Pivot Conversion. The
use of a third character encoding to serve as an intermediate
step in the conversion between two other character encodings.
The Unicode Standard is widely used to support pivot conversion,
as its character repertoire is a superset of most other coded
character sets.
Plain Text.
Computer-encoded text that consists only of a sequence of code
points from a given standard, with no other formatting or
structural information. Plain text interchange is commonly used
between computer systems that do not share higher-level
protocols. (See also fancy text.)
Plane. A range of 65,536 (1000016)
contiguous Unicode code points, where the first code point is an
integer multiple of 65,636 (1000016). Planes are
numbered from 0 to 16, with the number being the first code
point of the plane divided by 65,536. Thus Plane 0 is
U+0000..U+FFFF, Plane 1 is U+10000..U+1FFFF, ...,
and Plane 16 (1016) is U+100000..10FFFF.
(Note that ISO/IEC 10646 uses hexadecimal notation for the plane
numbers, e.g. Plane B instead of Plane 11). See Basic Multilingual Plane
and Supplementary Planes.
Points. (1) The nonspacing
vowels and other signs of written Hebrew. (2) A unit of
measurement in typography.
Polytonic. Ancient Greek
written with several contrastive accents.
Precomposed Character.
(See decomposable
character.)
Presentation Form. A
ligature or variant glyph that has been encoded as a character
for compatibility. (See also compatibility character
(1).)
Private Use. Unicode
scalar values (code points) from U+E000 to U+F8FF, U+F0000 to
U+FFFFD, and U+100000 to U+10FFFD are available for private use.
(See Definition D12 in Section 3.4,
Simple Properties .) Refers to code points of the standard
whose interpretation is not specified by the standard and whose
use may be determined by private agreement among cooperating
users.
Property. (See character properties.)
Radical. A structural
component of a Han character conventionally used for indexing.
The traditional number of such radicals is 214.
Rendering. (1) The process
of selecting and laying out glyphs for the purpose of depicting
characters. (2) The process of making glyphs visible on a
display device.
Repertoire. (See character repertoire.)
Replacement Character.
Character used as a substitute for an uninterpretable
character from another encoding. The Unicode Standard uses
U+FFFD REPLACEMENT CHARACTER for this function.
Replacement Glyph. A
glyph used to render a character that cannot be rendered with
the correct appearance in a particular font. It often is shown
as an open or black rectangle. Also known as a missing glyph.
(See Section 5.3, Unknown and Missing
Characters .)
Reserved. Unassigned code
points that are set aside for future standardization by the
Unicode Consortium.
Rich Text. (See fancy text.)
Row. A range of 256 contiguous
Unicode code points, where the first code point is an integer
multiple of 256. Two code points are in the same row if they
share all but the last two hexadecimal digits. See Plane.
SBCS. Acronym for single-byte
character set. Any 1-byte character encoding. This term is
generally used in contrast with DBCS and/or MBCS.
Scalar Value. (See Unicode scalar value.)
Script. A collection of symbols
used to represent textual information in one or more writing
systems.
SGML. Standard Generalized Markup
Language. A standard framework for defining particular text
markup languages. The SGML framework allows for mixing
structural tags that describe format with the plain text content
of documents, so that fancy text can be fully described in a
plain text stream of data. (See also HTML,
XML, and fancy
text.)
Shaping Characters.
Characters that assume different glyphic forms depending on the
context.
Small Letter. Synonym for
lowercase. (See case.)
Sorting. (See collation.)
Spacing Mark. A combining character that is not
a nonspacing mark. (See nonspacing
mark.)
Static Form. (See decomposable character.)
Supplementary Code
Point. A Unicode code point between U+10000 and
U+10FFFF.
Supplementary Character.
A Unicode encoded character having a supplementary code point.
Supplementary Planes.
Planes 1 through 16, consisting of the supplementary code
points.
Surrogate Code Point.
A Unicode code point in the range U+D800 through U+DC00.
Reserved for use by UTF-16, where a pair of surrogate code units
(a high surrogate followed by a low surrogate) "stand
in" for a supplementary code point.
Surrogate Character. A
misnomer. It would be an encoded character having a surrogate
code point, which is impossible. Do not use this term.
Surrogate Pair. A coded
character representation for a single abstract character that
consists of a sequence of two code units, where the first unit
of the pair is a high-surrogate
and the second is a low-surrogate.
(See Definition D27 in Section 3.7,
Surrogates .)
Syllabary. An alphabet whose
symbols typically represent multiple phonemes of a language.
These multiple phonemes are generally combinations of consonants
and vowels.
Syllable. (1) An element of a
syllabary. (2) A basic unit of articulation that corresponds to
a pulmonary pulse.
Symmetric Swapping.
(See mirrored.)
Tagging. The association of
attributes of text with a point or range of the primary text.
The value of a particular tag is not generally considered to be
a part of the "content" of the text. A typical example
of tagging is to mark the language or the font for a portion of
text.
TeX. Computer language designed
for use in typesetting, in particular for typesetting math and
other technical material. (According to Knuth, TeX rhymes with
the word blecchhh.)
Text Element. A minimum
unit of text in relation to a particular text process, in the
context of a given writing system. In general, the mapping
between text elements and code points is many-to-many. (See Chapter 2, General Structure .)
Titlecase. Uppercased
initial letter followed by lowercase letters in words. A casing
convention often used in titles, headers, and entries, as
exemplified in this glossary.
Tone Mark. A diacritic or nonspacing
mark that represents a phonemic tone. Tone languages are
common in Southeast Asia and Africa. Because tones always
accompany vowels (the syllabic nucleus), they are most
frequently written using functionally independent marks attached
to a vowel symbol. However, some writing systems such as Thai
place tone marks on consonant symbols; Chinese does not use tone
marks (except when it is written phonemically).
Transcoding. Conversion of
character data between different character sets.
Transformation Format.
A mapping from a coded character sequence to a unique sequence
of code units (typically bytes).
Triangulation. (See pivot conversion.)
UCS. Abbreviation for Universal
Character Set, which is specified by International Standard ISO/IEC
10646.
UCS-2. ISO/IEC 10646 encoding
form: Universal Character Set coded in 2 octets. (See Appendix C, Relationship to ISO/IEC 10646
.)
UCS-4. ISO/IEC 10646 encoding
form: Universal Character Set coded in 4 octets. (See Appendix C, Relationship to ISO/IEC 10646
.)
Umlaut. Two horizontal dots
over a letter, as in German Köpfe. The umlaut is not
distinguished from the diaeresis in the Unicode
character encoding. (See diaeresis.)
Unassigned. Code points
that either are reserved for future use or are never to be used.
Unicameral. A script that
has no case distinctions. Most often used in the
context of European alphabets.
Unicode Character
Database. A collection of files providing normative and
informative Unicode character properties and mappings. (See Chapter 4, Character Properties, and
the Unicode
Character Database.
Unicode Scalar Value.
A number N from 0 to 10FFFF16 defined by application
of the algorithm in Definition D28. (See Section 3.7,
Surrogates .) Also known as a code
point.
Unicode Sequence
Identifier. The representation of a sequence of two or
more Unicode code points as a comma-separated list Unicode
values enclosed in angle brackets, with an optional space
following each comma.
Example:
<U+0061, U+0301>
<U+10339, U+0308>
<U+0633, U+0645, U+062C>
Unicode Sequence Identifiers (USIs) are typically used to
represent combining character sequences, digraphs, ligatures,
and so forth, but can be used to represent any sequence
of Unicode code points.
Unicode Signature.
An implicit marker to identify a file as containing Unicode text
in a particular encoding form. An initial byte order mark
(BOM) may be used as a Unicode signature.
Unicode (or UCS) Transformation
Format. (See Definition D29 in Section 3.8,
Transformations , see also Section C.3,
UCS Transformation Formats .)
Unification. The process
of identifying characters that are in common among writing
systems.
Uppercase. (See case.)
URO. Abbreviation for Unified
Repertoire and Ordering, the original set of CJK
unified ideographs used in the Unicode Standard.
UTF. Abbreviation for Unicode
(or UCS) Transformation Format.
UTF-2. Obsolete name for UTF-8.
UTF-7. Unicode (or UCS)
Transformation Format, 7-bit encoding form, specified by RFC-2152.
UTF-8. Unicode (or UCS)
Transformation Format, 8-bit encoding form. UTF-8 is the Unicode
Transformation Format that serializes a Unicode scalar value
(code point) as a sequence of one to four bytes, as specified in
Table 3-1, UTF-8 Bit Distribution .
(See Definition D36 in Section 3.8,
Transformations .)
UTF-16. Unicode (or UCS)
Transformation Format, 16-bit encoding form. The UTF-16 is the
Unicode Transformation Format that serializes a Unicode scalar
value (code point) as a sequence of two bytes, in either big-endian
or little-endian format. (See Definition D35 in Section 3.8, Transformations .)
UTF-16BE. The Unicode
Transformation Format that serializes a Unicode scalar value
(code point) as a sequence of two bytes, in big-endian format.
An initial sequence corresponding to U+FEFF is interpreted as a
ZERO WIDTH NO-BREAK SPACE. (See Definition D33 in Section 3.8, Transformations .)
UTF-16LE. The Unicode
Transformation Format that serializes a Unicode scalar value
(code point) as a sequence of two bytes, in little-endian
format. An initial sequence corresponding to U+FEFF is
interpreted as a ZERO WIDTH NO-BREAK SPACE. (See Definition D34
in Section 3.8, Transformations
.)
Virama. The name of a symbol
used with Indic scripts to indicate a dead consonant. (See Section 9.1, Devanagari , and Section 9.6, Tamil.) Also called halant.
Visual Order. Characters
ordered as they are presented for reading. (Contrast with logical order.)
Vocalization. Marks
placed above, below, or within consonants to indicate vowels or
other aspects of pronunciation. A feature of Middle Eastern
scripts.
Vowel Mark. In many
scripts, a mark used to indicate a vowel or vowel quality.
wchar_t. The ANSI C defined wide
character type, usually implemented as either 16 or 32
bits. ANSI specifies that wchar_t be an integral type and that
the C language source character set be mappable by simple
extension (zero- or sign-extension).
Writing Direction.
The direction or orientation of writing characters within lines
of text in a writing system. Three directions are common in
modern writing systems: left to right, right to left, and top to
bottom.
Writing System. A set
of rules for using one or more scripts to write a particular
language. Examples include the American English writing system,
the British English writing system, the French writing system,
and the Japanese writing system.
XML. eXtensible Markup Language. A
subset of SGML constituting a particular text markup language
for interchange of structured data. The Unicode Standard is the
reference character set for XML content. (See also SGML and fancy text.) XML is a trademark of
the World Wide Web Consortium.
Zenkaku. (See fullwidth).
Zero Width. Characteristic
of some spaces or format control characters that do not advance
text along the horizontal baseline. (See nonspacing mark.)