A count of Unicode characters grouped by script

We all know what Unicode is (if you don't, then read all about it and come back later). We all know that it's big. Hey, of course it's big: its aim is to allow for the representation of characters from every major language script in the world. That's gotta be a lot of characters, right? It's reasonably easy to find out how many unicode characters there are in total: e.g. the Wikipedia page (linked above) states that: "As of Unicode 5.1 there are 100,507 graphic [assigned] characters." I got a bit curious today, and — to my disappointment — after some searching, I was unable to find a nice summary of how many characters there are in each script that Unicode supports. And thus it is that I present to you my count of all assigned Unicode characters (as of v5.1), grouped by script and by category.

The raw data

Fact: Unicode's "codespace" can represent up to 1,114,112 characters in total.

Fact: As of today, 100,540 of those spaces are in use by assigned characters (excluding private use characters).

The Unicode people provide a plain text listing of all supported Unicode scripts, and the number of assigned characters in each of them. I used this listing in order to compile a table of assigned character counts grouped by script. Most of the hard work was done for me. The table is almost identical to the one you can find on the Wikipedia Unicode scripts page, except that this one is slightly more updated (for now!).

Unicode script name Category ISO 15924 code Number of characters
Common Miscellaneous Zyyy 5178
Inherited Miscellaneous Qaai 496
Arabic Middle Eastern Arab 999
Armenian European Armn 90
Balinese South East Asian Bali 121
Bengali Indic Beng 91
Bopomofo East Asian Bopo 65
Braille Miscellaneous Brai 256
Buginese South East Asian Bugi 30
Buhid Philippine Buhd 20
Canadian Aboriginal American Cans 630
Carian Ancient Cari 49
Cham South East Asian Cham 83
Cherokee American Cher 85
Coptic European Copt 128
Cuneiform Ancient Xsux 982
Cypriot Ancient Cprt 55
Cyrillic European Cyrl 404
Deseret American Dsrt 80
Devanagari Indic Deva 107
Ethiopic African Ethi 461
Georgian European Geor 120
Glagolitic Ancient Glag 94
Gothic Ancient Goth 27
Greek European Grek 511
Gujarati Indic Gujr 83
Gurmukhi Indic Guru 79
Han East Asian Hani 71578
Hangul East Asian Hang 11620
Hanunoo Philippine Hano 21
Hebrew Middle Eastern Hebr 133
Hiragana East Asian Hira 89
Kannada Indic Knda 84
Katakana East Asian Kana 299
Kayah Li South East Asian Kali 48
Kharoshthi Central Asian Khar 65
Khmer South East Asian Khmr 146
Lao South East Asian Laoo 65
Latin European Latn 1241
Lepcha Indic Lepc 74
Limbu Indic Limb 66
Linear B Ancient Linb 211
Lycian Ancient Lyci 29
Lydian Ancient Lydi 27
Malayalam Indic Mlym 95
Mongolian Central Asian Mong 153
Myanmar South East Asian Mymr 156
N'Ko African Nkoo 59
New Tai Lue South East Asian Talu 80
Ogham Ancient Ogam 29
Ol Chiki Indic Olck 48
Old Italic Ancient Ital 35
Old Persian Ancient Xpeo 50
Oriya Indic Orya 84
Osmanya African Osma 40
Phags-pa Central Asian Phag 56
Phoenician Ancient Phnx 27
Rejang South East Asian Rjng 37
Runic Ancient Runr 78
Saurashtra Indic Saur 81
Shavian Miscellaneous Shaw 48
Sinhala Indic Sinh 80
Sundanese South East Asian Sund 55
Syloti Nagri Indic Sylo 44
Syriac Middle Eastern Syrc 77
Tagalog Philippine Tglg 20
Tagbanwa Philippine Tagb 18
Tai Le South East Asian Tale 35
Tamil Indic Taml 72
Telugu Indic Telu 93
Thaana Middle Eastern Thaa 50
Thai South East Asian Thai 86
Tibetan Central Asian Tibt 201
Tifinagh African Tfng 55
Ugaritic Ancient Ugar 31
Vai African Vaii 300
Yi East Asian Yiii 1220

Regional and other groupings

The only thing that I added to the above table myself, was the data in the "Category" column. This data comes from the code charts page of the Unicode web site. This page lists all of the scripts in the current Unicode standard, and it groups them into a number of categories, most of which describe the script's regional origin. As far as I can tell, nobody's collated these categories with the character-count data before, so I had to do it manually.

Into the "Miscellaneous" category, I put the "Common" and the "Inherited" scripts, which contain numerous characters that are shared amongst multiple scripts (e.g. accents, diacritical marks), as well as a plethora of symbols from many domains (e.g. mathematics, music, mythology). "Common" also contains the characters used by the IPA. Additionally, I put Braille (the "alphabet of bumps" for blind people) and Shavian (invented phonetic script) into "Miscellaneous".

From the raw data, I then generated a summary table and a pie graph of the character counts for all the scripts, grouped by category:

Category No of characters % of total
African 915 0.91%
American 795 0.79%
Ancient 1724 1.71%
Central Asian 478 0.48%
East Asian 84735 84.28%
European 2455 2.44%
Indic 1185 1.18%
Middle Eastern 1254 1.25%
Miscellaneous 5978 5.95%
Philippine 79 0.08%
South East Asian 942 0.94%

Unicode character count by category
Unicode character count by category

Attack of the Han

Looking at this data, I can't help but gape at the enormous size of the East Asian character grouping. 84.3% of the characters in Unicode are East Asian; and of those, the majority belong to the Han script. Over 70% of Unicode's assigned codespace is occupied by a single script — Han! I always knew that Chinese contained thousands upon thousands of symbols; but who would have guessed that their quantity is great enough to comprise 70% of all language symbols in known linguistic history? That's quite an achievement.

And what's more, this is a highly reduced subset of all possible Han symbols, due mainly to the Han unification effort that Unicode imposed on the script. Han unification has resulted in all the variants of Han — the notable ones being Chinese, Japanese, and Korean — getting represented in a single character set. Imagine the size of Han, were its Chinese / Japanese / Korean variants represented separately — no wonder (despite the controversy and the backlash) they went ahead with the unification!

Broader groupings

Due to its radically disproportionate size, the East Asian script category squashes away virtually all the other Unicode script categories into obscurity. The "Miscellaneous" category is also unusually large (although still nowhere near the size of East Asian). As such, I decided to make a new data table, but this time with these two extra-large categories excluded. This allows the size of the remaining categories to be studied a bit more meaningfully.

For the remaining categories, I also decided to do some additional grouping, to further reduce disproportionate sizes. These additional groupings are my own creation, and I acknowledge that some of them are likely to be inaccurate and not popular with everyone. Anyway, take 'em or leave 'em: there's nothing official about them, they're just my opinion:

Here's the data for the broader groupings:

Grouping No of characters % of total
Ancient 1724 17.54%
Indic 1742 17.73%
Native 1710 17.40%
European 2455 24.98%
Middle Eastern 1254 12.76%
South-Eastern 942 9.59%

Unicode character count by grouping
Unicode character count by grouping

And there you have it: a breakdown of the number of characters in the main written scripts of the world, as they're represented in Unicode. European takes the lead here, with the Latin script being the largest in the European group by far (mainly due to the numerous variants of the Latin alphabet, with accents and other symbols used to denote regional languages). All up, a relatively even spread.

I hope you find this interesting — and perhaps even useful — as a visualisation of the number of characters that the world's main written scripts employ today (and throughout history). If you ever had any doubts about the sheer volume of symbols used in East Asian scripts (but remember that the vast majority of them are purely historic and are used only by academics), then those doubts should now be well and truly dispelled.

It will also be interesting to see how this data changes, over the next few versions of Unicode into the future. I imagine that only the more esoteric categories will grow: for example, ever more obscure scripts will no doubt be encoded and will join the "Ancient" category; and my guess is that ever more bizarre sets of symbols will join the "Miscellaneous" category. There may possibly be more additions to the "Native" category, although the discovery of indigenous writing systems is far less frequent than the discovery of indigenous oral languages. As for the known scripts of the modern world, I'd say they're well and truly covered already.

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