means A character encoding standard that represents any written language using variable-length sequences of bytes, where English needs one byte per letter but emoji need four.

from Created in 1992 by Ken Thompson and Rob Pike at Bell Labs as a pragmatic fix to Unicode's bloat problem. Unicode had assigned every human character a number, but storing each as a fixed 32-bit integer wasted absurd amounts of space. UTF-8 (Unicode Transformation Format, 8-bit) was the elegant answer: use one byte for ASCII, multiple bytes for everything else. It became the internet's default language almost by accident—simple, backward-compatible, efficient.