Unicode has been designed as a universal text encoding for all languages. But it has recently been filled with countless emojis which come in and out of fashion.

Has Unicode a finite size? If so, when will it be full?

1. Finite size

Unicode has been designed with a fixed size from the get go: 1 112 064 possible Unicode code points.

2. Rate of filling

Wikipedia provides the number of unicode characters for each version. Here it is reproduced:

Plot
Figure 1. Number of Unicode points over time

3. Trend

The linear fit extrapolated from the data is:

\(numberOfUnicodePoints = 4188 * year - 8312126\)

The maximum limit will be reached during the year 2250.

4. Conclusion

Unicode is still good for about 220 years at the current rate, which is good enough for now.

However, I do wonder why it was designed with a hard limit in the first place, instead of an expanding limit.