What Does Unicode Transformation Format (UTF) Mean?
The Unicode Transformation Format (UTF) is a character encoding format which is able to encode all of the possible character code points in Unicode. The most prolific is UTF-8, which is a variable-length encoding and uses 8-bit code units, designed for backwards compatibility with ASCII encoding.
Techopedia Explains Unicode Transformation Format (UTF)
The Unicode Transformation Format is one of two encodings used in Unicode, the other one being the Universal Character Set (UCS). They are both used to map the range of Unicode code points into sequences of termed code values. The numbers in the names of the encoding indicate how many bits are being used in one code value of the encoding. This simply means that each unique character is being assigned a code identifier called code points.