UCS uses 31 bits for character storage Contains all known characters and symbols First 128 characters are the same as ASCII First 256 characters are the same as ISO-8859-1 Unicode 3.0 describes the BMP ~(Basic Multilingual Plane)~ (16 bits) Unicode 3.1 describes other planes (21 bits) Characters are ordered in language/script blocks: Basic latin, Cyrillic, Hebrew, Arabic, Gujarati, Runic, CJK etc. Encoding in numerous encodings: UCS-2, UCS-4, UTF-8, UTF-16 etc. A Њ א ث અ ᛪ 媛