Unicode Demystified

Han Characters in Unicode

Unicode includes a truly huge number of Han characters: 70,195 different characters are included in Unicode 3.1. The Han character set in Unicode represents a massive effort put forth by a lot of East Asian–language experts over a long period of time.

Unlike with most of the other modern scripts encoded in Unicode, there's no set number of Han characters.^[6] They number well into the tens of thousands, but no definitive listing of all of them exists. Not only are new characters created frequently, but numerous characters appear perhaps once or twice in all East Asian writing. Some of these forms might just be idiosyncratic ways of writing more common characters, but some are new coinages created for an ad hoc purpose ...