A code point is a unique number assigned to each character in the Unicode standard. It is written as U+ followed by hexadecimal digits: U+0041 (Latin capital A), U+3042 (hiragana a), U+1F600 (grinning face emoji).

Unicode defines approximately 1.1 million possible code points (0 to 10FFFF), with about 150,000 characters assigned as of 2024. Unicode standard references explain the code point system in detail.

In JavaScript, String.codePointAt() retrieves a code point, and String.fromCodePoint() creates a character from a code point.

One code point does not always correspond to one visible character. Combining characters and emoji sequences use multiple code points to form a single grapheme cluster. Unicode programming books teach accurate character handling.