Private Use Areas

This article is about the Unicode PUA range of codepoints. For other uses, see Private use area (disambiguation).

In Unicode, the Private Use Areas (PUA) are three blocks that are not assigned characters by the standard. The three blocks are Private Use Area, in the Basic Multilingual Plane (U+E000–U+F8FF), Supplementary Private Use Area-A and Supplementary Private Use Area-B, the latter two being in and covering nearly all of planes 15 and 16 (U+F0000–U+FFFFD, U+100000–U+10FFFD), respectively. 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.