Unicode is a comprehensive character encoding standard maintained by the Unicode Consortium, designed to support text in all digitizable writing systems, with Version 17.0 defining 159,801 characters across 172 scripts. It has largely replaced the myriad of incompatible legacy character sets, now encoding the vast majority of text on the Internet and capable of holding over 1.1 million characters. Rather than just a list of characters, the standard assigns a unique code point to each grapheme, leaving visual styling to software, and is synchronized with ISO/IEC 10646, while also providing annexes on normalization, collation, and directionality. The standard famously encodes 3,790 emoji, which was a major factor in their global adoption outside Japan. To store this data, Unicode defines three main encodings—UTF-8, UTF-16, and UTF-32—with UTF-8 being the most widely used due to its backwards-compatibility with ASCII. Originally designed to overcome the total incompatibility of earlier encodings, its first 256 code points mirror ISO/IEC 8859-1 to ease the conversion of existing text.