The Unicode characters can be categorized in many different ways, Unicode code points can be logically divided into 17 planes, each with 65,536 (= 2¹⁶) code points.

Currently, about ten percent of the potential space is used. Furthermore, ranges of characters have been tentatively blocked out for every current and ancient writing system (script) the Unicode consortium has been able to identify: (see [1]). While Unicode may eventually need to use another of the spare 11 planes for ideographic characters, other planes remain, if previously unknown scripts with tens of thousands of characters are discovered. This 21-bit limit (17 planes with each 65,536 code points leads to 1,114,112 code points in total; to encode these using a bit-array we need at least 21 bits as 2²¹ = 2,097,152) is therefore unlikely to be reached in the near future.

Sometimes, terms “astral plane” and “astral characters” are used informally to refer to the planes above the Basic Multilingual Plane (i.e., planes 1, 2… 16) and their characters.^[1]

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