Unicode = Universal Code?

As most dictionaries have analyzed the language in the last couple of centuries, there have been 214 radicals and 888 phonetics, making a theoretical possibility of 190,032 compound characters, although not all combinations are in fact possible. The largest Chinese dictionary lists 49,905 characters, leaving the remaining hundred and forty thousand or so yet to be invented. The Unicode Consortium, keeper of the new international standard for computer representation of scripts in all languages, defined 20,901 characters in version 2.1, and promptly enlarged the total character set for "CJK" (Chinese, Japanese, and Korean) to 27,482 in version 3, published in 2000. It is sometimes claimed that the average person today probably needs knowledge of about 3000 characters to be reasonably literate, but people have noticed that computer fonts of fewer than 12,000 or so characters turn out to cramp one's style.