Big5
Range
Characters
Symbols, line drawing, numerals, ...
A140 - A343
466
Greek
A344 - A373
48
Bopomofo
A374 - A3BA
37
Tone symbols
A3BB - A3BF
5
Contol characters
A3C0 - A3E0
33
Level 1 hanzi
A440 - C67E
5 401
Level 2 hanzi
C940 - F9D5
7 652
Total
13 494
You can see all characters in their respective range here
The name Big5 is because 5 companies helped in the development of it. It was published on May 1, 1984 by the Institute for Information Industry of Taiwan (台灣資訊工業策進會) as the Computer Chinese Glyph and Character Code Mapping Table, Technical Report C-26 (電腦用中文字型與字碼對照表, 技術通報C-26)
Since it's a 94x157 matrix it has a maximum capacitly of 14 758 symbols. It contains two mistakes: there are two characters who are encoded twice. 兀 wù (on 0xA461 and 0xC94A) and 嗀 huò (0xDCD1 and 0xDDFC).
A very important extension is the ETen extension. It contains two blocks, the first block (C6A1 - C3D3) has 365 characters (numbers, kana, ...) the second block (F9D6 - F9FE) only has 7 hanzi (碁 銹 裏 墻 恒 粧 嫺) and 34 line drawing characters. The second block is incorporated in CNS 11643-1992 in plane 3.
[ < back ] - [ home ]