Deseret is a phonemic alphabet that was developed in the 1850s by the regents of the University of Deseret, now the University of Utah. Deseret was used to write the English language, and was promoted by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (also known as the Mormon or LDS Church), under Church President Brigham Young (1801–1877). George Watt, who was a secretary to Brigham Young, contributed to the script's development. Though the Church published four books and other materials were written in the script, it did not gain wide acceptance and was not actively promoted after 1869.

The Devanagari script is used to write classical Sanskrit and its modern variant, Hindi. The script is also used to write many other languages. Devanagari is a Brahmi-derived script, like the Sinhala script of Sri Lanka, the Tibetan script, and many South and Southeast Asian scripts. The Devanagari Extended block includes cantillation marks for the Samaveda, marks of nasalization, and a few editorial marks.

The characters in the Dingbats block are derived from the ITC Zapf Dingbats series 100, a set of glyphs which make up the “Zapf Dingbat” font currently available on most laser printers. The Zapf Dingbats are considered an industry standard. The font was created in 1977 and 1978 by the German type designer Hermann Zapf. Other dingbat glyphs series - which are not found in the Zapf Dingbat font - exist, but they are not encoded in the Unicode Standard because they have not been widely implemented in hardware and software as character-encoded fonts. A number of the characters from the ITC Zapf Dingbats series may appear in other blocks if the symbol was deemed to be a generic symbol used in other contexts.

Domino tiles are a set of graphical symbols that appear on tiles used in the game of dominoes. Dominoes ultimately derive from Chinese tile games dating back to the 12C CE; the Chinese version differs from the European version of dominoes, which first appeared in the 18C in Italy.

The block of characters in the Egyptian Hieroglyphs block is based largely on the Middle Egyptian sign list in Gardiner's 1957 book Egyptian Grammar. Hieroglyphic writing appeared in Egypt at the end of the fourth millennium BCE, and the hieroglyphic writing system used to write the Egyptian language for more than 3,000 years. Between 700 and 1,000 hieroglyphs were in regular use from the Old Kingdom until the New Kingdom. The hieroglyphs represent people and animals, clothing, tools, vessels, and more.

The Emoticons block includes images used in email messages to convey an emotion or an attitude. Many of these symbols are found in the emoji sets of Japanese cell phone carriers. The term "emoticon" derives from "emotion" and "icon." The use of images in writing appeared at least since the 19C, when Morse code was used to create emoticons. In the late 20C, ASCII combinations were used as emoticons in email messages, such as " ;) ", attributed to Scott Fahlmann in an email message in 1982.

The characters in the Enclosed Alphanumerics block consist of single Latin letters, digits, or numbers that are enclosed by a circle or parentheses, or followed by a full stop (period). These symbols are meant to function as numbered (or lettered) bullets in ordered lists, and most were added for compatibility with East Asian character sets The Enclosed Alphanumeric Supplement block includes more combinations of Latin letters, digits, or numbers, which may be enclosed by a square, an oval, parentheses, brackets or followed by a comma. They are largely included to provide compatibility with the Japanese television standard (ARIB STD B24) or Japanese cell phone emoji sets. The supplemental block also includes 52 regional indicators, which are ASCII letters of the alphabet enclosed in a dotted box. These characters can be combined in pairs to represent the ISO 3166 regional codes (i.e., "F" and "R" stand for "FR," for France). On some implementations, the combination could be displayed with an alternate display, such as a flag of France.

The Enclosed CJK Letters and Months block is made up of large sets of circled or parenthesized Japanese Katakana, Hangul Jamo, and CJK ideographs, which derive from East Asian character sets. It also contains circled numbers from 21 to 50, and a small number of Chinese telegraph symbols and square Latin abbreviations. Additionally, 8 characters (U+3248 to U+324F) are included from the Japanese standard, ARIB STD B24. These 8 characters are made up of the circled numbers from 10 to 80, laid out on a black square. These were used to designate symbols appearing on speed limit signs, which post the speed in kilometers per hour.

The Enclosed Ideographic Supplement block is mainly made up of images enclosed in squares, circles or brackets, and are intended primarily for use in closed captioning on Japanese television. The symbols include squared Katakana word symbols, a subset of symbols referring to broadcast terminology, and a group of bracketed symbols used in baseball in Japan.

The Ethiopic syllabary was created for writing the Semitic language Ge’ez. The Ge’ez language is now limited to liturgical usage, but the Ethiopic script has been adopted for modern use in writing several languages of central east Africa, including Amharic, Tigre, and Oromo. Towards the end of the first millennium BCE, the South Arabian script was introduced into the Horn of Africa, where it was adapted to write the Ge'ez language. In the 4c CE, the script changed into the left-to-right syllabary with vowel representation that serves as the basis of the Ethiopic script.

The General Punctuation block contains characters commonly found in Latin typography, with a few specialized punctuation marks. Several format control characters are also in the block. The punctuation symbols are shared across scripts and may be used for any script. (Other widely used punctuation marks are contained in the Basic Latin and Latin-1 Supplement block.) The Supplemental Punctuation block includes a collection of miscellaneous punctuation symbols, such as variant brackets, hyphens, and dots used in historical works or specialized notation.

The Geometric Shapes block is a collection of characters for various commonly used geometrical shapes, including squares, triangles, and circles. The characters come from various national and vendor character standards. Additional geometric shapes appear in the Miscellaneous Symbols and Arrows block.

The Georgian script is used for writing the Georgian language and its variant dialects, and for the Svan and Mingrelian languages. In the past, it was used for Abkhaz and other languages of the Caucasus. According to some, the alphabet was invented by Mesrop Maštoc‘ ca. 5C, who is also credited with creating the Armenian alphabet and the Caucasian Albanian (Old Udi) alphabet. Historically, Georgian was written with two closely related scripts: Asomtavruli, an inscriptional form of the Georgian writing system, and a manuscript form derived from it, called Nuskhuri. In time, Asomtavruli became the uppercase of the Georgian writing system, and Nuskhuri the lowercase, and the two are categorized Khutsuri. Later, an alphabet called Mkhedruli became the dominant form for writing modern Georgian, replacing Khutsuri, which remained in use for liturgical purposes. The Georgian block encodes the Mkhedruli alphabet and the Asomtavruli inscriptional form. The Nuskhuri script form is encoded in the Georgian Supplement block.

Glagolitic is an alphabet believed to have been devised by Saint Cyril circa 862 CE in order to translate the Scriptures and liturgical books into Slavonic. The script exists in two styles, known as round and square. Round Glagolitic is the original style and more geographically widespread, whereas square Glagolitic was used in Croatia from the 13C. In Croatia, Glagolitic was used until at least 1893. The representative glyphs in the codecharts are round Glagolitic, since not all the characters are found in the square style. Eventually, Glagolitic was replaced by the alphabet now known as Cyrillic.

The Gothic script is a writing system for the Gothic language. It is believed that the script was devised in the 4C by the Gothic bishop, Wulfila (311–383 CE), to enable his people to read his translation of the Bible. Wulfila appears to have used the Greek script as a source for the Gothic script. The remaining Gothic written materials are mostly restricted to portions of Wulfila's translation of the Bible. Gothic is an East Germanic language, an extinct member of the Germanic branch of the Indo-European language family. It is not known when the script died out; a few 9C fragments of Gothic text are not necessarily evidence of any active use, but may indicate antiquarian interest.

The Greek script has been used to write the Greek language since the 8C or 9C BCE. The Greek script has given rise to many other alphabets used in Europe and the Middle East, including the Latin, Cyrillic, and Coptic scripts. Greek is contained in two blocks, one called Greek and Coptic and a second block called Greek Extended. The Greek portion of the Greek and Coptic block is based on ISO/IEC 8859-7. It also includes some additional historic letters and signs from Greek. The Greek Extended block includes precomposed forms of Greek with diacritics, and spacing forms of diacritics. For characters with diacritics, users can choose characters from the Greek Extended block, or from the Greek and Coptic block, with any needed combining diacritics from the Combining Diacritic Marks block.

The Gujarati script is a used to write the Gujarati language of the Gujarat state in western India. Gujarati is a North Indian script, derived from Brahmi, and closely related to Devanagari. Unlike Devanagari, it has no horizontal head-bar. The script dates to at least the 16C.

The Gurmukhi script is used to write the Punjabi (or Panjabi) language of the Punjab state of India, and is attributed to Angad, the second Sikh Guru who lived from 1504 to 1552. Gurmukhi is a North Indian script derived from the Landa script (ultimately from Brahmi) and is closely related to Devanagari. It is closely associated with Sikhs and Sikhism.

The Halfwidth and Fullwidth Forms block contains Latin, CJK, Katakana and Hangul characters that were added to provide compatibility with older East Asian standards. These characters include "halfwidth" forms, which only occupy half a rectangle, and "fullwidth" forms, which permit, for example, Latin letters to fill an entire rectangle. In the case of Latin characters, the "fullwidth" forms should not be used in place of the Latin characters in the Basic Latin block (ASCII), unless one needs backward compatibility with East Asian standards.

The Hangul script is used for the Korean language. This syllabic script is formed from a set of alphabetic components called jamo. Hangul is the preferred name in South Korea, although the script goes by Choseongul in North Korea. A politically neutral term, Jeongum, may also be used. The script was invented ca. 1444 was and officially put forward during the reign of King Sejong (1418-1450).