Tamil Unicode Standards
Enabling Tamil in the Digital World
What is Unicode?
Unicode is a universal character encoding standard that assigns a unique number to every character used in writing systems across the world. It ensures that Tamil text can be correctly displayed, stored, and transmitted on any modern device or platform — whether it is a computer, smartphone, web browser, or database.
Before Unicode, Tamil text relied on various proprietary font encodings (such as TSCII, TAB, and TAM) that were incompatible with each other. A document created with one encoding would display garbled text when opened with a different encoding. Unicode solved this problem by providing a single, universally accepted standard.
Tamil in the Unicode Standard
Tamil characters are encoded in the Unicode block U+0B80 to U+0BFF, known as the "Tamil" block. This block was included in the very first version of the Unicode Standard (1.0) released in 1991, recognising Tamil as one of the world's essential scripts.
The Tamil Unicode block contains 72 assigned characters, including:
- 12 vowels (உயிரெழுத்துகள்): அ, ஆ, இ, ஈ, உ, ஊ, எ, ஏ, ஐ, ஒ, ஓ, ஔ
- 18 consonants (மெய்யெழுத்துகள்): க், ங், ச், ஞ், ட், ண், த், ந், ப், ம், ய், ர், ல், வ், ழ், ள், ற், ன்
- 1 special character: ஃ (ஆய்த எழுத்து — Aytam)
- Vowel signs (dependent vowels) used to combine with consonants
- Tamil digits: ௦, ௧, ௨, ௩, ௪, ௫, ௬, ௭, ௮, ௯
- Tamil numerals for 10 (௰), 100 (௱), and 1000 (௲)
- Special symbols: Tamil day sign (௳), month sign (௴), year sign (௵), and more
How Tamil Unicode Works
Tamil Unicode uses a logical encoding model. Rather than assigning a separate code point to each of the 247 possible Tamil characters (12 vowels + 18 consonants + 216 vowel-consonant combinations + ஃ), Unicode encodes vowels and consonants separately and uses combining rules to form compound characters.
For example, the syllable "கா" (kā) is encoded as two code points:
- U+0B95 — க (ka, the consonant)
- U+0BBE — ா (the dependent vowel sign for ā)
The rendering engine on your device combines these two code points into the visual glyph "கா". This approach keeps the encoding compact while supporting the full range of Tamil typography.
Key Unicode Ranges for Tamil
- U+0B82–U+0B83 — Signs (Anusvara, Visarga/Aytam)
- U+0B85–U+0B94 — Independent vowels
- U+0B95–U+0BB9 — Consonants
- U+0BBE–U+0BC2 — Dependent vowel signs
- U+0BC6–U+0BC8 — Dependent vowel signs (left-side)
- U+0BCA–U+0BCD — Dependent vowel signs and Pulli
- U+0BD7 — AU length mark
- U+0BE6–U+0BEF — Tamil digits (0–9)
- U+0BF0–U+0BF2 — Tamil numerals (10, 100, 1000)
Benefits of Tamil Unicode
- Universal compatibility — Tamil text works across all devices and platforms
- Searchability — Search engines can index and retrieve Tamil content
- Copy and paste — Text can be freely copied between applications
- Sorting and collation — Tamil text can be alphabetically sorted correctly
- Accessibility — Screen readers can interpret Tamil Unicode text
- Data integrity — Tamil text is preserved accurately in databases and files
Tamil Unicode and TamilGrammarCheck
TamilGrammarCheck is built entirely on Unicode standards. All text processing — including grammar checking, spelling correction, transliteration, and document export — uses Unicode Tamil encoding. This ensures that your Tamil content is compatible with any modern application, can be searched by Google and other search engines, and will display correctly on any device.
Our English-to-Tamil transliteration feature converts your romanised input into proper Tamil Unicode characters in real time, so you can type Tamil content using an English keyboard without needing any special software or fonts installed.