It is often useful to divide the UNICODE character set into eight areas.
| Area | Description |
|---|---|
| General scripts | Latin, Greek, Cyrillic, Hebrew, Arabic, Indic, and other characters. |
| Symbols | Arrows, mathematical symbols, and punctuation. |
| CJK Phonetics and Symbols | Hiragana, Katakana, and Bopomofo. CJK stands for Chinese, Japanese, and Korean. |
| CJK Ideographs | Chinese, Japanese, and Korean ideographs. |
| Hangul Syllables | Complete set of modern Hangul. |
| Surrogates | Code points designed to extend the range of Unicode within the ISO 10646 encoding scheme. |
| Private Use Area | The Private Use Area contains characters for sharing site-defined characters from the KanjiEBCDIC, KanjiEUC, and KanjiShift-JIS client character sets. |
| Compatibility Zone | The Compatibility Zone contains halfwidth and fullwidth variants of characters defined by Japanese standards and, among others, includes Hankaku (halfwidth) Katakana and fullwidth ASCII characters. |
The first 1880 characters of the Private Use Area are used for sharing site-defined characters from KanjiEBCDIC, KanjiEUC, and KanjiShift-JIS client character sets.
The following table defines the use of the Private Use Area.
| Name | Unicode Range | KanjiShift-JIS Range | KanjiEUC Range | KanjiEBCDIC Range | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Gaiji-1 | U+E000 to U+E3AB | 0xF040 to 0xF4FC (1st 940 Gaiji) |
0xF5A1 to 0xFEFE (Rows 85-94 JIS X 0208) |
0x6941 to 0x6DF4 (1st 940 Gaiji) |
Shared by all. (940 characters) |
| Gaiji-2 | U+E3AC to U+E757 | 0xF540 to 0xF9FC (2nd 940 Gaiji) |
0x8FF5A1 to 0x8FFEFE (Rows 85-94 JIS X 0212) |
0x6DF5 to 0x72EA (2nd 940 Gaiji) |
Shared by all. (940 characters) |
| Graphic Error Character | U+F8FF | Not applicable | Not applicable | Not applicable | Associated with the VARGRAPHIC function |