Unicode in Microsoft Windows

Microsoft was one of the first companies to implement Unicode in their products. Windows NT was the first operating system that used "wide characters" in system calls. Using the (now obsolete) UCS-2 encoding scheme at first, it was upgraded to the variable-width encoding UTF-16 starting with Windows 2000, allowing a representation of additional planes with surrogate pairs. However Microsoft did not support UTF-8 until May 2019.

A large amount of Microsoft documentation uses the word "Unicode" to refer explicitly to the UTF-16 encoding. Anything else, including UTF-8, is not "Unicode" in Microsoft's outdated language (while UTF-8 and UTF-16 are both Unicode according to the Unicode Standard, or encodings/"transformation formats" thereof).

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