Big news! We have a brand new archive page! Now you can SCROLL ENDLESSLY through the archive, or type in a comic number and read from there! I think it's very cool, and much better than the old "giant list of 6000 comics" version.

 By: Peter Constable, Chair of the Unicode Technical Committee

The Unicode® Standard provides the character encoding that underlies text in the world’s language on billions of devices, in apps and across the web. The next version of the standard, version 18.0, will be released later this year. A beta review period for Unicode 18.0 has started and is open until July 7, 2026.

The beta is intended primarily for review of character property data and changes to algorithm specifications (Unicode Standard Annexes and certain Unicode Technical Standards that are synchronized with the Unicode Standard). Implementers are encouraged to review these changes for consistency or unexpected issues. Also, a complete draft of the core specification text is available for review during the beta period.

At this phase of a release, the character repertoire is considered stable. No new characters will be added. Characters that are new in this version could still be removed, and their character names or code points could be changed, but such changes would require strong justification.

For this release, 13,047 new characters will be added, bringing the total number of encoded characters in Unicode 18.0 to 172,848. The largest set of additional characters is for the new Small Seal script with 11,328 ideographs. Other notable character additions include:

• Chisoi script: a modern script used in northeast India.
• Jurchen script: an historic ideographic script used in northeastern China during the Jin and Ming dynasties.
• New currency symbols for the Maldivian rufiyaa, Omani rial and UAE dirham currencies.
• 72 historical mathematical symbols.
• 73 musical symbols.
• Nine new emoji characters.

See The Pipeline and the delta code charts pages for details on all of the new characters.

In addition to new characters, there are some significant changes related to character properties or algorithms, including the following:

• A new Unicode Standard Annex will be added to document properties for large, non-CJK East Asian scripts.
• Two provisional properties for CJK Unified ideographs will be removed, and two new provisional properties will be added.
• The derivation of one of the properties used for grapheme cluster segmentation of Indic scripts will be revised.
• There will be significant revisions to the confusable characters data (confusables.txt) relevant for security.

It was found that wording in the core specification of earlier versions was not completely clear regarding variation sequences and conformance. To provide greater clarity, the text describing variation sequences and related conformance requirements will be revised. See section 3.6.2 in the draft core spec for details.

See the Unicode 18.0 Beta landing page for other noteworthy property and algorithm changes. For full details regarding the Beta review, see Public Review Issue #548. Feedback should be reported under PRI #548 using the Unicode Contact Form by July 7, 2026.