Private Use Areas
Updated: 12/11/2025, 6:14:50 PM Wikipedia source
In Unicode, a Private Use Area (PUA) is a range of code points that, by definition, will not be assigned characters by the standard. 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). They are intentionally left undefined so that third parties may assign their own characters without conflicting with Unicode Standard 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 code points 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.
Infobox
Range
U E000..U F8FF(6,400 code points)
Plane
BMP
Scripts
Unknown
Assigned
6,400 code points
Unused
0 reserved code points
1 (1991)
5,632 ( 5,632)
1.0.1 (1992)
6,400 ( 768)
Tables
· Usage › Standardization initiative uses
CSUR
CSUR
Publishing organization
CSUR
Topic
Artificial and some ancient/medieval scripts
PUA area used
PUA (BMP) and Plane 15
Font
Code2000
MUFI
MUFI
Publishing organization
MUFI
Topic
Medieval scripts
PUA area used
PUA (BMP)
Font
several
SIL
SIL
Publishing organization
SIL
Topic
Phonetics and languages
PUA area used
PUA (BMP)
Font
Charis SIL
TITUS
TITUS
Publishing organization
TITUS
Topic
Ancient and medieval scripts
PUA area used
PUA (BMP)
Font
TITUS Cyberbit Basic
| Publishing organization | Topic | PUA area used | Font |
| CSUR | Artificial and some ancient/medieval scripts | PUA (BMP) and Plane 15 | Code2000 |
| MUFI | Medieval scripts | PUA (BMP) | several |
| SIL | Phonetics and languages | PUA (BMP) | Charis SIL |
| TITUS | Ancient and medieval scripts | PUA (BMP) | TITUS Cyberbit Basic |
References
- The last two characters of every plane are defined to be noncharacters. The remaining 65,534 characters of each of plane
- Unicode Consortiumhttps://unicode.org/glossary/#private_use_area
- "Unicode Character Encoding Stability Policy"https://unicode.org/policies/stability_policy.html
- The Unicode Standard Version 14.0 - Core Specificationhttps://www.unicode.org/versions/Unicode14.0.0/ch23.pdf
- The Unicode Standardhttps://www.unicode.org/ucd/
- The Unicode Standardhttps://www.unicode.org/versions/enumeratedversions.html
- The Unicode Standard, Version 1.0, Volume 1https://www.unicode.org/versions/Unicode1.0.0/ch03_5.pdf
- Unicode 1.0.1https://www.unicode.org/versions/Unicode1.0.0/Notice.pdf
- The Unicode Standard, Version 1.1https://www.unicode.org/versions/Unicode1.1.0/ch02.pdf
- Unicodehttps://www.unicode.org/L2/L2000-UTC/u2000-015.txt
- "Emoji Symbols: Background Data"https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2010/10132-emojidata.pdf
- Mediumhttps://ken-lunde.medium.com/the-gb-18030-2022-standard-3d0ebaeb4132
- "Letter Database"http://www.eki.ee/letter/chardata.cgi?ucode=e000-f8ff
- "Character Sets: East Asian Characters: Alternative Unicode Mappings for MARC 21 Characters Assigned to the Private Use Area (PUA): MARC 21 Specifications for Record Structure, Character Sets, and Exchange Media"https://www.loc.gov/marc/specifications/specchar.pua.html
- "tunerfc.tn.nic.in"https://web.archive.org/web/20100729194712/http://www.tunerfc.tn.nic.in/
- "Unicode Corporate Use Subarea as used by Adobe Systems"https://web.archive.org/web/20021009225850/http://partners.adobe.com/asn/developer/type/corporateuse.txt
- "NSOpenStepUnicodeReservedBase - Apple Developer Documentation"https://developer.apple.com/documentation/foundation/nsopenstepunicodereservedbase
- "CORPCHAR.TXT - Registry (external version) of Apple use of Unicode corporate-zone characters"https://www.unicode.org/Public/MAPPINGS/VENDORS/APPLE/CORPCHAR.TXT
- Microsofthttps://web.archive.org/web/20140717022830/http://www.microsoft.com/typography/otspec/wgl4e.htm
- Microsoft Supporthttps://web.archive.org/web/20160527200113/https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/117258
- GitHubhttps://github.com/apple-oss-distributions/ntfs/blob/ntfs-91.50.2/util/ntfs.util.c
- Microsoft Knowledge Basehttps://web.archive.org/web/20121022095705/http://support.microsoft.com/kb/897872
- SIL Internationalhttps://web.archive.org/web/20150511005915/http://scripts.sil.org/cms/scripts/page.php?site%5Fid=nrsi&item%5Fid=PUACharsInMSSotware
- Launchpadhttps://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu-font-family/+bug/651606/comments/8/+index
- Launchpadhttps://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu-font-family/+bug/853855/comments/2/+index
- Unicodehttps://www.unicode.org/L2/L2019/19068r2-powerline-syms.pdf
- Powerline beta documentationhttps://powerline.readthedocs.io/en/latest/installation.html#fonts-installation
- GitHubhttps://github.com/unicode-org/icu/blob/master/icu4c/source/data/mappings/lmb-excp.ucm
- Lotus 1-2-3 Version 3.1 Referenzhandbuch
- REGISTRY: Graphic Character Sets and Code Pageshttps://public.dhe.ibm.com/software/globalization/gcoc/attachments/CP01445.pdf
- REGISTRY: Graphic Character Sets and Code Pageshttps://public.dhe.ibm.com/software/globalization/gcoc/attachments/CP01445.txt
- IBM Globalization: Code page identifiershttps://web.archive.org/web/20150916190822/http://www-01.ibm.com/software/globalization/cp/cp01449.html
- unicode.nam: Allow the Unicode characters to be specified using either the IBM or PostScript like nameshttp://www.borgendale.com/tools/tools.htm
- "Configure character mapping for SMB file name translation on volumes"https://docs.netapp.com/us-en/ontap/smb-admin/configure-character-mappings-file-name-translation-task.html
- Copy Paste Dumphttps://c.r74n.com/twitter/chirp
- "Standard ECMA-48, Fifth Edition - June 1991"https://www.ecma-international.org/wp-content/uploads/ECMA-48_5th_edition_june_1991.pdf
- C1 Control Character Set of ISO 6429https://itscj.ipsj.or.jp/ir/077.pdf
- The Unicode Standard Version 14.0 - Core Specificationhttps://www.unicode.org/versions/Unicode14.0.0/ch04.pdf
- "Map (external version) from Mac OS Japanese encoding to Unicode 2.1 and later"http://ftp.unicode.org/Public/MAPPINGS/VENDORS/APPLE/JAPANESE.TXT