Unicode Character Lookup Online — Find Code Points, Names & Encodings Free

What Is Unicode?

Unicode is a universal character encoding standard that assigns a unique numeric identifier — called a code point — to every character used in human writing. The current version of Unicode (15.x) contains over 149,000 characters covering 161 scripts, including Latin, Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Cyrillic, Devanagari, and many more, plus emoji, mathematical symbols, and historical scripts.

Unicode code points are written in the format U+XXXX where XXXX is the hexadecimal code point number. For example, the letter 'A' is U+0041, the euro sign '€' is U+20AC, and the thumbs-up emoji '👍' is U+1F44D.

How to Look Up a Unicode Character Online

1. Open the Unicode lookup tool at DevKits.
2. Search by character — paste the character directly into the search field.
3. Search by code point — enter U+1F44D or just 1F44D.
4. Search by name — type "thumbs up" to find related characters.
5. Read the character details — code point, name, block, category, UTF-8 bytes, UTF-16 code units, and HTML entity.

Key Features

• Search by character, code point, or name — multiple lookup paths for any character.
• Complete character metadata — Unicode name, category, block, script, and bidirectionality class.
• All encoding representations — UTF-8 bytes, UTF-16 code units, HTML decimal entity, HTML hex entity, CSS escape, JavaScript escape.
• Batch lookup — paste a string to see all its characters analyzed at once.
• Category browser — explore characters by block (e.g., "Arrows", "Dingbats", "Emoticons").

Use Cases

Identifying Mystery Characters

Sometimes you encounter a character in a document or data file that looks unusual or is invisible — a zero-width space, a right-to-left mark, or a look-alike homoglyph. Pasting the suspicious character into a Unicode lookup reveals exactly what it is, its code point, and its semantic meaning.

Finding the Right Character for Design

Designers and developers often need specific symbols — arrows, checkmarks, typographic quotes, mathematical operators — that are available as Unicode characters and don't require image assets. A Unicode search by name (e.g., "right arrow") returns all relevant characters with previews.

Debugging Encoding Issues

Encoding bugs often manifest as unexpected characters appearing in text. Looking up these characters in a Unicode tool reveals whether they're replacement characters (U+FFFD), byte-order marks (U+FEFF), or encoding artifacts from a UTF-8/Latin-1 mismatch.

Internationalizing Applications

When building applications that support multiple languages, developers need to understand how different scripts handle directionality (RTL vs. LTR), normalization forms (NFC, NFD, NFKC), and combining characters. Unicode lookup tools provide the bidi class and normalization data for any character.

Security Research (IDN Homograph Attacks)

Internationalized domain names (IDN) can use Unicode characters that visually resemble Latin letters — a Cyrillic 'а' looks identical to Latin 'a' but has a different code point (U+0430 vs. U+0061). Unicode lookup tools help identify these homoglyphs in phishing domain analysis.

Important Unicode Concepts

Code Points vs. Code Units

A code point is a number assigned to a character (e.g., U+1F44D = 👍). A code unit is how that number is stored in a specific encoding. UTF-8 uses 1–4 bytes per code point. UTF-16 uses 2 or 4 bytes. JavaScript strings are stored as UTF-16, which means supplementary characters (code points above U+FFFF) use 2 code units (a surrogate pair) and make JavaScript's String.length return 2 instead of 1.

Frequently Asked Questions

How many characters does Unicode define?

Unicode 15.1 defines 149,813 characters across 161 scripts. The maximum possible code space is 1,114,112 code points (U+0000 to U+10FFFF), of which a large number are reserved for future use.

What is a Unicode code point?

A code point is a number assigned to a character in the Unicode standard, written as U+XXXX (with 4–6 hex digits). Code points range from U+0000 to U+10FFFF.

What is the difference between UTF-8 and UTF-16?

Both are encoding forms of Unicode. UTF-8 uses 1–4 bytes per character and is dominant on the web. UTF-16 uses 2 or 4 bytes and is used internally by JavaScript, Java, and Windows APIs. ASCII characters are 1 byte in UTF-8 but 2 bytes in UTF-16.

How do I insert a Unicode character in HTML?

Use decimal entities (€ for €) or hex entities (€ for €), or simply include the character directly in UTF-8 encoded HTML since all modern browsers support UTF-8.

What are zero-width characters?

Zero-width characters (like U+200B zero-width space, U+200C zero-width non-joiner, U+200D zero-width joiner) are invisible characters that affect text rendering and joining behavior. They're sometimes used in steganography, text fingerprinting, or invisible watermarking.