Unicode
name, noun, slang ·Moderate ·College level
Definitions
- 1 Characters from a contextually different script, often used in a nonstandard fashion. Sometimes used as an antonym to the characters of the Latin alphabet. broadly, informal, uncountable
"Since most users on the site are westerners, we have banned Unicode in all text input boxes."
- 1 A series of character encoding standards intended to support the characters used by a large number of the world’s languages.
"This character isn't in Unicode."
- 2 Alternative letter-case form of Unicode. alt-of
"As Kyle Chayka writes in a new history of the symbol at The Awl, the meaning of the “the shruggie” is always two, if not three- or four-, fold. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ represents nihilism, “bemused resignation,” and “a Zen-like tool to accept the chaos of universe.” It is Sisyphus in unicode."
- 3 The Unicode standards, together with standards for representing character strings as byte strings.
"convert to Unicode"
Synonyms
All synonymsExample
More examples""ASCII quotes" are a substitute character for the “real” quotes that vary from language to language, and the advent of Unicode have rendered ASCII quotes obsolete."
Etymology
Published as a draft proposal in 1988, “intended to suggest a unique, unified, universal encoding”. From uni- + code.
Related phrases
More for "unicode"
Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.