ideographs

The Maya system worked much like classical Japanese or ancient Egyptian, and uses a mix of ideographs and purely phonetic symbols.

Think of all the symbols notetakers invent; ideographs without even phonology assigned to it.

Emoji, TUI blocks, rare accented characters you need once in a blue moon, CJK ideographs, whatever.

One of the things I hate the most about Unicode is the CJK unified ideographs.

Outside of Han China and a few other areas in its historical cultural area of influence, alphabetic scripts won over ideographs, and won big time.

Lots of the rarer CJK ideographs are outside the BMP.

It would appear to me that the relatively low word count (ideographs) has not impeded Chinese from thinking about the world around them in a negative way...

Alternatively, if Unicode directly encoded words, rather than letters, of Western languages akin to ideographs in East Asian languages, it's like arguing that 'color' and 'colour' should be separate code points.

If the Chinese had first invented the typewriter/word processor using their ideographs, they wouldn't have used it, and only when alphabetic (or abjad or abugida) language users invented it would it start to get used.

There may be software that makes an effort to render IDSes (Ideographic Description Sequences) as existing or generated ideographs (or whacha may call those), but I have yet to see one.

Therefore there are a zillion homonyms (and puns) and a lot of inherent ambiguity, which is addressed by context and, as you note, except for children, using full kanji (adopted Chinese ideographs).

It is so amazing that the CJK Unified Ideographs block is still being extended to this day, even though I do know many intricacies of encoding those characters, like Z-variants and normalization rules and such.

Suddenly what you were considering "your name" is no more, and your new name is spelled in ideographs.

This means that the latin character width is roughly half of character height, so "full-width" square CJK ideographs fits exactly as the width of two "half-width" latin characters.

For perspective, this update also brings 4316 new CJK (Chinese, Japanese, and Korean) characters, which "pushes the number of CJK ideographs to over 100,000" (quoting from the release).

The decision to produce "CJK Unified Ideographs" in Unicode was not without controversy, and quite a few words have been spent by standards committees on explaining why these characters should share code points while there are completely separate Latin, Greek and Cyrillic scripts (despite shared history and many at-least-seemingly overlapping glyphs).

The main block is 4E00-9FFF CJK Unified Ideographs.