Private Use Areas
| Private Use Area | |
|---|---|
| Range | U+E000..U+F8FF (6,400 code points) |
| Plane | BMP |
| Scripts | Unknown |
| Assigned | 6,400 code points |
| Unused | 0 reserved code points |
| Unicode version history | |
| 1.0.0 | 5,632 (+5,632) |
| 1.0.1 | 6,400 (+768) |
| Note: Version 1.0.1 moved and expanded the Private Use Area block (previously located at U+E800-U+FDFF in version 1.0.0). | |
| Supplementary Private Use Area-A | |
|---|---|
| Range | U+F0000..U+FFFFF (65,536 code points) |
| Plane | SPUA-A |
| Scripts | Unknown |
| Assigned | 65,534 code points |
| Unused | 0 reserved code points 2 non-characters |
| Unicode version history | |
| 2.0 | 65,534 (+65,534) |
| Note: | |
| Supplementary Private Use Area-B | |
|---|---|
| Range | U+100000..U+10FFFF (65,536 code points) |
| Plane | SPUA-B |
| Scripts | Unknown |
| Assigned | 65,534 code points |
| Unused | 0 reserved code points 2 non-characters |
| Unicode version history | |
| 2.0 | 65,534 (+65,534) |
| Note: | |
In Unicode, a Private Use Area (PUA) is a range of code points that, by definition, will not be assigned characters by the Unicode Consortium. Currently, three private use areas are defined: one in the Basic Multilingual Plane (U+E000–U+F8FF), and one each in, and nearly covering, planes 15 and 16 (U+F0000–U+FFFFD, U+100000–U+10FFFD). The code points in these areas cannot be considered as standardized characters in Unicode itself. They are intentionally left undefined so that third parties may define their own characters without conflicting with Unicode Consortium assignments. Under the Unicode Stability Policy, the Private Use Areas will remain allocated for that purpose in all future Unicode versions.
Assignments to Private Use Area characters need not be "private" in the sense of strictly internal to an organisation; a number of assignment schemes have been published by several organisations. Such publication may include a font that supports the definition (showing the glyphs), and software making use of the private-use characters (e.g. a graphics character for a "print document" function). By definition, multiple private parties may assign different characters to the same code point, with the consequence that a user may see one private character from an installed font where a different one was intended.
Under the Unicode definition, code points in the Private Use Areas are assigned characters—they are not noncharacters, reserved, or unassigned. Their category is "Other, private use (Co)", and no character names are specified. No representative glyphs are provided, and character semantics are left to private agreement.
Private-use characters are assigned Unicode code points whose interpretation is not specified by this standard and whose use may be determined by private agreement among cooperating users. These characters are designated for private use and do not have defined, interpretable semantics except by private agreement.
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In the Basic Multilingual Plane (plane 0), the block titled Private Use Area has 6400 code points. Planes 15 and 16 are almost entirely assigned to two further Private Use Areas, Supplemental Private Use Area-A and Supplemental Private Use Area-B respectively.
In order to encode characters from planes 15 and 16 in UTF-16, a further block of the BMP is assigned to High Private Use Surrogates (U+DB80..U+DBFF, 128 code points).
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