What Does Universal Coded Character Set (UCS) Mean?
The Universal Coded Character Set (UCS) is a character encoding standard defined by ISO/IEC 10646. It is a standard set of characters which are used as a basis for many other character encodings. UCS contains over a hundred thousand abstract characters, and each is identified through a unique name and a sequence of integer numbers called the code point.
Techopedia Explains Universal Coded Character Set (UCS)
The Universal Coded Character Set was originally published by the Unicode Consortium, a special interest group of American manufacturers, as the 16-bit Unicode V 1.0 in 1991 and was updated to V 1.1 in 1993. Meanwhile, the ISO/IEC was creating something entirely different, but decided to adapt Unicode V 1.1 since they understood its importance, and drafted this into ISO/IEC 10646 Universal Multi-Octet Coded Character Set. Both the Unicode and the ISO/IEC standards have remained largely in step and the standards are effectively interchangeable, the only difference being that the Unicode is a 16-bit subset of the 32-bit character set ISO/IEC 10646.
