At UTC Meeting #188 on July 30, 2026, the Unicode Technical Committee authorized the release of Unicode 18.0 with a target date of September 16 — the first Unicode release ever scheduled on a Wednesday. In the same session it reverted the Chisoi script out of the release entirely, sending its 40 characters to Unicode 19.0.
Until UTC #188, the Consortium's own version page for Unicode 18.0 read "2026 September NN" — the month committed, the day still a placeholder. That placeholder is now filled in. The committee's formal consensus at the meeting authorizes the release of Unicode 18.0 and its synchronized companion standards — UTS #10, #39, #46, #51 and #58 — "with a target release date of September 16, 2026."
There's a small piece of Unicode trivia buried in that date. Unicode has published its releases on Tuesdays for years — 17.0, 16.0 and 15.1 all landed on one. September 16, 2026 is a Wednesday, and that's deliberate: the Release Management Group noted that Tuesday publication is "often challenging due to many national holidays being on Mondays," and has moved all future releases to Wednesdays. Unicode 18.0 is the first release scheduled under the new convention.
You can watch the change happen in the paperwork. A draft of UTS #51 — the emoji annex — was posted on July 24, four days before the meeting, and still carried an Emoji 18.0 date of 2026-09-15. September 15 is a Tuesday. The release slipped exactly one day to clear the new Wednesday rule.
Chisoi is a modern script — not an ancient one — used to write Kurmali, a language of northeast India. It had a genuinely long road into the standard: provisionally assigned back in 2023, accepted for encoding in Unicode 17.0, then re-targeted to 18.0. It shipped in the 18.0 beta in May, and our own beta coverage listed it as one of the release's four new scripts.
It won't be in the September release. The cause sits outside Unicode entirely: ISO/IEC's parallel character standard, ISO/IEC 10646, is developed in lockstep with Unicode, and when its working group processed comments on the matching edition it removed Chisoi to allow more time for national body review. Unicode's repertoire has to stay synchronized with ISO's, so UTC #188 followed suit: it reverted the earlier approval, set Chisoi's 40 code points (U+16D80–U+16DA9) back to provisionally assigned, and moved the script to the Unicode 19.0 pipeline.
Nothing about this suggests Chisoi is in trouble — a national body review is a procedural step, not a rejection, and the script already sits in the published preliminary repertoire for Unicode 19.0. It's simply late.
| What the beta said | What UTC #188 decided |
|---|---|
| Four new scripts: Small Seal, Jurchen, Proto-Cuneiform, Chisoi | Three — Chisoi postponed to Unicode 19.0 |
| 13,047 new characters | 13,007 — exactly 40 fewer, now restated on the Consortium's own version page |
Small Seal characters named SEAL CHARACTER-XXXXX | Renamed to SMALL SEAL CHARACTER-XXXXX — all 11,328 of them |
| Final release "expected September 2026" | Authorized for September 16, 2026 |
Sourced from the Release Management Group's report to UTC #188, which records each decision as a formal committee consensus, cross-checked against the Consortium's own Unicode 18.0 version page. That page still shows a placeholder day for the release itself and still uses the pre-rename "Seal" script name, so expect it to catch up over the coming weeks.
This entry exists because it makes one of our own pages wrong. Our Unicode 18.0 beta review entry counted Chisoi among the release's four new scripts and put the character total at 13,047 — both accurate at beta, both superseded on July 30. That's exactly the kind of staleness this section exists to catch and date, rather than quietly edit away.
The confirmed date also sharpens every other Unicode 18.0 page we run. The UAE dirham symbol now has a specific publication day rather than a vague month, as does the wider Middle East currency symbol scorecard — though publication still only fixes each character in the standard, not on anyone's keyboard. For the symbols you can already type today, currency symbols is the browsable set, and alt codes covers the keyboard workaround in the meantime.
The emoji slate came through untouched. The emoji subcommittee's report to this meeting recommends "no changes to the emoji repertoire" for Unicode 18.0 — the nine new characters stand as approved, and the meeting's action items call for a complete set of final charts for Emoji 18.0 on the same September 16 track. What did change is cosmetic: three chart glyphs were redrawn to cut down on how differently vendors render them. We cover the nine symbol by symbol, and which ones the public actually voted for, in a separate entry.
Beyond that, Unicode 19.0 already has a published preliminary repertoire — Chisoi now among it, alongside the Sirmauri script, Proto-Cuneiform expansions, a block of Leibnizian "ambiguous signs" (plus/minus variants used for dating manuscripts, not the calculus notation the name suggests), and a new Belarusian ruble sign at U+20C5, submitted by Belarus's own central bank and modelled on the property treatment the Saudi riyal sign got before it. None of it is approved: the Release Management Group explicitly noted it "is not requesting any UTC action at this time," with formal approvals possible at the next two meetings. We'll pick that up when it firms.
Browse symbol and emoji collections, or look up one character's full identity — codepoint, meaning, and device support.
Open the Unicode Library →All decisions above are recorded in the Release Management Group Report to UTC #188 (L2/26-160R), dated July 28, 2026 and revised after the meeting, with release-phase context from unicode.org/versions/Unicode18.0.0. Beta-stage figures for comparison come from the Consortium's beta review announcement.