Unicode general categories

The General Category is the most-used classification in the Unicode Character Database. It assigns each of the 1,114,112 codepoints to exactly one of thirty two-letter codes. The first letter names a major group — L for letter, M for mark, N for number, P for punctuation, S for symbol, Z for separator, C for other — and the second letter narrows the bucket: u for uppercase, l for lowercase, d for decimal digit, and so on. The full table was largely settled in Unicode 1.0 (1991) and has barely changed since.

The category drives almost every piece of higher-level text processing you encounter. A regex engine implements \p{L} as "any codepoint whose General Category starts with L." Word-break algorithms classify spaces using Z, identifier syntax in C, Java and Python uses L + Nd + Pc, and bidi neutrals are largely the P and S groups. Even Unicode Security Mechanisms (UAX #39) lean on the General Category to decide which codepoints are safe in identifiers.

All 30 categories

The seven major groups

Each major group has its own page with longer-form notes and example characters. Emoji is shown alongside because the Emoji property is independent of General Category — most emoji are So, but a handful are Po or even Nd.