> With 65,536 possible combinations, this is perfectly adequate to support the characters from all major languages in use worldwide [1] It depends on how you r

> With 65,536 possible combinations, this is perfectly adequate to support the characters from all major languages in use worldwide [1] It depends on how you represent characters. Korean Hangul represents each square shape separately so requires over 10,000 characters. If it hadn't been like that, Korea wouldn't have accepted Unicode for use because it would have multiplied the number of bytes required to represent characters from their existing system. There's 10,000 Japanese/Chinese Kanji in modern use, plus another less commonly used 65,000 encoded, and there's no consistent way to represent them as components. > If unicode had stuck to representing existing characters and symbols and said no to requests for stuff like emoji and klingon, string representation in modern software could have been kept a whole lot simpler. Klingon was rejected for encoding by the Unicode Consortium in 1997, and remains excluded to this day. emoji was included as a political nod to the Japanese, who even today are the main holdouts to Unicode being the exclusive code for worldwide use.