UTF-16

UTF-16 is a character encoding standard for Unicode. It encodes each Unicode code point using either one or two code units. Each code unit is a 16-bit value.

Code points whose values are less than 216 are encoded as a single code unit that is numerically equal to the code point’s value. These code points comprise the Basic Multilingual Plane (BMP)#Basic_Multilingual_Plane>), and include the most common characters, including Latin, Greek, Cyrillic, and many East Asian characters.

For example, the Latin character “A” is assigned the code point U+0041 in Unicode, and this is represented in UTF-16 as the single code unit 41.