Unicode is a character encoding standard that aims to support all languages of the world. It evolved from limitations of earlier standards like ASCII that could only represent English characters. Unicode uses 16-bit or 32-bit encodings to represent over 1 million characters, as opposed to ASCII's 128 characters. Popular Unicode encodings include UTF-8, UTF-16, and UTF-32. The widespread adoption of Unicode has allowed globalization of text and the internet by supporting the simultaneous use of different languages.