Unicode is a standard for representing characters across different platforms and languages. It defines coding schemes like UTF-8, UTF-16, and UTF-32 to represent characters as binary values. UTF-16 uses 16-bit values for most characters but introduces surrogate pairs to represent some characters requiring two 16-bit values. UTF-32 uses 32-bit values for all characters. UTF-8 varies the number of bytes per character from 1 to 4 to optimize for English. Unicode aims to support all languages with a single encoding scheme.