system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
ELI5: How can unicode, which uses 16 bits to represent the characters in its set, represent so many languages with only 65,000 characters?

I don't understand how unicode can represent so many languages with 65,000 characters. Unless, each language has a separate unicode set for the characters. But if that's the case, isn't it a waste to use Unicode for English? It only has 26 letters.
gpt
Unicode doesn't use 16 bits for each character. Each character is represented as a unique number (a code point) which can take up to 21 bits (so that's over a million characters). The actual number of bits used in a piece of text depends on the encoding. In, UTF-8, one of the most common encodings, every character is encoded with between 1 and 4 bytes depending on how much is needed to represent the code point.

Edit: `s/billion/million/`