Seal Script in Unicode

Draft Minutes of UTC (Unicode Technical Committee) Meeting 185 Cupertino, California, United States — October 27-29, 2025 Hosted by Apple in Cupertino and virtually UTC #185 Agenda Revision date: November 26, 2025

https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2025/25226.htm#185-C3

As has been true since the beginning of Unicode (see Mair and Liu, Characters and Computers [1991], of the total number of new code points to be added to Unicode, the proportion devoted to Sinoform characters is greater by an order of magnitude than for all other scripts and symbols (cuneiform, Arabic, Armenian, Bengali, Devanagari, Hebrew, Kana, Latin, Mongolian, emojis, alchemy, mathematics, etc.) put together.

Hangul syllables, which derive their basic shape from sinographs, are also Unicode code point hungry.

Feast your eyes on these tables of Unicode blocks, and don't stop reading till you get to the bottom:  

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode_block

Some people have suggested that all of Xu Bing's made-up characters in "Book from the Sky" should also be entered in Unicode, even though we don't know what any of them mean or how they are pronounced.  That's 4,000 more meaningless code points right there.  Other artists have made similar critiques and elaborations of the Chinese writing system.  Since Xu Bing's work and most of the others like it, not to mention the already existing sinographic writing system itself, are open-ended, that means including them would subject Unicode to an infinity of additional sinoform code points.

D.1 Section 1.2 Seal Script

Discussion of the name of the block. Participants agreed that “Seal” is preferable to “Small Seal”. The ISO 15924 registrar noted that the English script name is “(Small) Seal”.

Discussion of the status of properties.

[185-C3] Consensus: UTC accepts 11328 code points U+3D000..U+3FC3F for encoding in a new Seal block based on WG 2 N5344R, for Unicode Version 18.0. Of the proposed properties, kSEAL_THXSrc, kSEAL_CCZSrc, kSEAL_DYCSrc, and kSEAL_QJZSrc are Normative. The others are Provisional. [Ref. 1.2 in L2/25-232R]

[185-A5] Action Item for Ken Whistler, RMG: Update the Pipeline to include 11328 Seal characters U+3D000..U+3FC3F based on WG 2 N5344R, accepted for Unicode Version 18.0. [Ref. 1.2 in L2/25-232R]

[185-A6] Action Item for V.S. Umamaheswaran, SAH: Update the roadmap to reflect accepted code points for the Seal script: U+3D000..U+3FC3F. [Ref. 1.2 in L2/25-232R]

[185-A7] Action Item for Michel Suignard, EDC: Update Table 4-8 in the Core Specification to include name derivation prefix for the Seal script, for Unicode Version 18.0. [Ref. 1.2 in L2/25-232R]

[185-A8] Action Item for Michel Suignard, EDC: Provide block description for the Seal block in the Core Specification, for Unicode Version 18.0. [Ref. 1.2 in L2/25-232R]

[185-A9] Action Item for Michel Suignard, SAH: In Unicode Standard Annex #60, “Data for non Han ideographic scripts”, add properties for Seal as described in WG 2 N5344R.

Some advocates of the sinographs (hanziphiles), even famous university professors, think that the sinographic writing system is superior to all others because it has far more discrete elements than do alphabets, syllabaries, abjads, and so forth.  Oy vey!

 

Selected readings

• "Unicode CJK Unified Ideographs Extension J and the nature of the sinographic writing system" (6/16/25)
• "Language is not script and script is not language, part 2" (7/10/22)
• "Language is not script and script is not language" (1/23/22)
• "How many more Chinese characters are needed?" (10/25/16)
• "Language vs. script" (11/21/16)
• "Triple review of books on characters and computers" (8/23/24)
• "Chinese character inputting" (10/17/15)
• "Sinographic inputting: 'it's nothing' — not" (2/22/21) — with lengthy bibliography
• Victor H. Mair and Yongquan Liu, eds., Characters and Computers (Amsterdam, Oxford, Washington, Tokyo:  IOS, 1991)
• "Is there a practical limit to how much can fit in Unicode?" (10/27/17)
• "Sinographs by the numbers" (1/22/19)
• "Idiosyncratic stroke order" (11/23/18) — and the long list of earlier posts at the bottom
• "The wrong way to write Chinese characters" (11/28/18) — You may get all the strokes of a character, but if you don't write them in the correct order, you have miswritten the character, for example, the 29 strokes of this one:

yù 鬱 ("depression; blues; dense; despondent; dismal; dispirited; low-spirited; melancholy; sweet smelling")

enlarged and animated