The Supplementary Multilingual Plane: Ancient Scripts and More
Plane 1—the Supplementary Multilingual Plane (SMP)—is where Unicode stores historic scripts, specialised symbols, and the vast majority of emoji. Spanning U+10000 to U+1FFFF, the SMP contains over 90 scripts and symbol sets that wouldn't fit in the Basic Multilingual Plane. If you've ever used an emoji or worked with ancient script texts, you've used SMP characters. Browse all Unicode planes for an overview.
Historic and Ancient Scripts
The SMP is home to a remarkable collection of ancient and historic writing systems:
- Linear B (U+10000–U+1007F): The oldest recorded form of Greek, used in Mycenaean palace administration around 1400–1200 BCE.
- Cuneiform (U+12000–U+123FF): The script of ancient Mesopotamia used for Sumerian, Akkadian, and other languages.
- Egyptian Hieroglyphs (U+13000–U+1342F): Over a thousand hieroglyphs used in ancient Egyptian writing.
- Gothic (U+10330–U+1034F): The 4th-century Gothic alphabet used in the Wulfila Bible translation.
- Old Italic (U+10300–U+1032F): Ancestor of the Latin alphabet, used in Etruscan and other pre-Roman Italian inscriptions.
Music and Mathematics
The SMP includes Musical Symbols (U+1D100–U+1D1FF) covering traditional Western notation: clefs, note values, accidentals, and more. The adjacent Mathematical Alphanumeric Symbols block (U+1D400–U+1D7FF) provides the bold, italic, script, Fraktur, and double-struck letter variants used in mathematical typography.
Emoji
Most modern emoji live in the SMP. The Emoticons block (U+1F600–U+1F64F), Miscellaneous Symbols and Pictographs (U+1F300–U+1F5FF), Transport and Map Symbols (U+1F680–U+1F6FF), and Supplemental Symbols and Pictographs (U+1F900–U+1F9FF) are all in Plane 1. Because SMP characters require 4-byte UTF-8 sequences and surrogate pairs in UTF-16, they are the source of many emoji-related string-handling bugs in software that wasn't written with supplementary characters in mind.