Talk:Private Use Areas

Requested move 22 April 2025

The following is a closed discussion of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. Editors desiring to contest the closing decision should consider a move review after discussing it on the closer's talk page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

The result of the move request was: not moved. – robertsky (talk) 17:31, 7 May 2025 (UTC)

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Private Use Areas → Unicode private use areas – To comply with Wikipedia capitalisation conventions (uncontroversial and must happen) and also to render the article specific to unicode (for discussion). It is otherwise a general term with a confusingly named article. Millstream3 (talk) 17:16, 22 April 2025 (UTC) — Relisting. Valorrr ^{(lets chat)} 16:04, 30 April 2025 (UTC)

oppose: Unicode documentation capitalizes it as Private Use Area(s) Spitzak (talk) 20:39, 22 April 2025 (UTC)

Could you explain why that is relevant? Millstream3 (talk) 03:33, 24 April 2025 (UTC)

Wikipedia:COMMONNAME. Also immediately reopening this after being it being defeated is a pretty low-class move. Spitzak (talk) 18:19, 30 April 2025 (UTC)

Oppose redux: "Do not capitalize the second or subsequent words in an article title, unless the title is a proper name" (emphasis added). Spitzak (talk) 18:25, 30 April 2025 (UTC)

support per WP:SENTENCECASE — GhostInTheMachine ^{talk to me} 06:37, 23 April 2025 (UTC)

... being clear – I support Unicode private use areas. Unicode has a block named Private Use Area (UC for a specific title), but three private use areas (lc for a collective term). We might have a future article Private use area to cover the concept for standards in general, so this article needs to be clear that it is specific to the three areas within Unicode — GhostInTheMachine ^{talk to me} 06:53, 27 April 2025 (UTC)

Unicode does collectively refer to these blocks as "Private Use Areas" with that capitalization (see 23.5 Private-Use Characters). When they want to specifically refer to the one in the BMP, Unicode refers to it as the "primary Private Use Area" or "Private Use Area: U+E000–U+F8FF". --SnorlaxMonster 11:53, 28 April 2025 (UTC)

Oppose: Like many defined Unicode terms, "Private Use Area" is always capitalized in Unicode documentation. This article is specifically about the Unicode concept, with only a short section at the end of the article describing private use areas in other encoding systems, so it makes sense to capitalize it in accordance with the Unicode concept. There could be a case for moving this article to Private Use Area (Unicode) and having a page at Private use areaPrivate use area about the concept in general, but I'm not sure if there would be enough content to justify that (at least not without seeing a draft). However, even if a split like that were to occur, I do not think "Unicode private use areas" would be an appropriate title, as that is not how the name of the concept is formatted in the context of Unicode. --SnorlaxMonster 03:35, 24 April 2025 (UTC)

The only capitalisation scheme that matters is Wikipedia's - it is irrelevant how the Unicode documentation refers to it. So far, there has been no valid opposition to renaming to Private use areas. I have noted the opposition to renaming to Unicode private use areas. Millstream3 (talk) 15:58, 26 April 2025 (UTC)

Wikipedia's naming scheme is WP:COMMONNAME. As with most technical terms, Unicode's terminology (and their capitalization of it) is what you will usually find in secondary sources (and of course what you will almost invariably find in primary sources). The non-Unicode sources currently cited on this page (that specifically use the term "Private Use Area") almost all capitalize it that way: — The Powerline docs was the only one of the secondary sources that I found does not.

As a sidenote, you're welcome to disagree with my perspective, but it's disingenuous to construe arguments you disagree with as invalid. How Unicode chooses to capitalize terms they have defined is clearly very relevant to how Wikipedia should choose to capitalize them. Wikipedia uses common names not official names, so is not required to follow Unicode's standards — but in the absence of secondary sources indicating that the uncapitalized form is the common name rather than the Title Case version, I don't see any reason to deviate from Unicode's documentation. --SnorlaxMonster 17:57, 26 April 2025 (UTC)

Well I disagree with people on this but am not going to pursue it. Technical writing is rife with unnecessary capitalisation. For example, in medicine, diseases are commonly (wrongly) capitalised. The point of sentence case is to break through this and render Wikipedia article titles in a common and consistent way. It is it truly irrelevant how the Unicode documentation chooses to render Private Use Areas and it is equally irrelevant what individual authors of this article think. Best wishes, Millstream3 (talk) 12:13, 3 May 2025 (UTC)

Oppose: A Private Use Area (PUA) is a range of code points for private use. Capitalized, it's the name of those areas, uncapitalized it's a description. PUAs function like blocks. For all of the other Unicode block articles we use the block name per the Unicode Standard. For example, "Alphabetic Presentation Forms", not "Alphabetic presentation forms". I don't see why PUAs should be different. DRMcCreedy (talk) 20:39, 26 April 2025 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Nerd Fonts

As I understand the Nerd Fonts project, they patch developer fonts to add PUA characters from Powerline, Font Awesome, Devicons, Weather Icons, Seti UI, Octicons, Font Logos, IEC Power symbols, Pomicons, Material Design and Codicons. Some are already mentioned in this article, but others aren't. Should they? -- Error (talk) 18:04, 28 January 2026 (UTC)

Requested move 26 June 2026

The following is a closed discussion of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. Editors desiring to contest the closing decision should consider a move review after discussing it on the closer's talk page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

The result of the move request was: no consensus. Absolute mess. Was going to close as not moved, but the consensus isn't completely clear. (non-admin closure) Robloxguest3 (talk) 02:46, 27 July 2026 (UTC)

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Private Use Areas → Private Use AreaPrivate Use Area – Depluralize title, per WP:TITLE. The article intro already uses a singular form in the boldtext. Zenphia1 (talk) 11:43, 26 June 2026 (UTC) — Relisting. Jeffrey34555 (talk) 17:50, 4 July 2026 (UTC) — Relisting. TarnishedPath^talk 08:47, 12 July 2026 (UTC) — Relisting. BilledMammal (talk) 02:11, 20 July 2026 (UTC)

• Still Oppose. After 12 years, this is still an article on three distinct Private Use areas defined in the Unicode Standard: the original Private Use Area, which is what the singular name exclusively refers to in the definite, as well as Supplementary Private Use Area A, and Supplementary Private Use Area B, also known as planes 15 and 16. They are collectively the Private Use Areas referred to in the title, and the use of the plurals for classes of objects, such as this, is explicitly called for at WP:Naming conventions (plurals), which is cited directly from the WP:Singular section at WP:TITLE. This basic fact has not changed in 12 years, and due to Unicode's stability policy, it will never change until the reference to the Unicode Standard is no longer the primary topic or the scope of the article is changed: the singular form is factually incorrect as a name for this article. VanIsaac, GHTV ^contr_about 08:19, 27 June 2026 (UTC)

  In The Unicode Standard version 17, 23.5 Private-Use Characters, the Private Use Area in the Basic Multilingual Plane is referred to as the "primary Private Use Area", while the Private Use Areas in Plane 15 and 16 are referred to as "supplementary Private Use Areas". In Section 5.3 Unknown and Missing Characters, "the Private Use Area" is used to refer to all three Private Use Areas at once. The block E000-F8FF is still named "Private Use Area" (although the standard has to qualify it using the range of codepoints or as "primary Private Use Area" when referring to it), but as noted in the Unicode glossary, "Private Use Area" refers to any of the three blocks.

  Additionally, the Unicode stability policy does not actually appear to guarantee the stability of block names. However, I don't believe any have been renamed since the stability policy was adopted, since the characters themselves being stable means there is rarely a reason to rename the blocks.

  It is simply untrue that "the singular form is factually incorrect". Naming this article "Private Use Area" in the singular, and referring to "a Private Use Area" (as the article already does), would be entirely consistent with The Unicode Standard. However, whether that would be a better title is a different question. SnorlaxMonster 07:35, 28 June 2026 (UTC)

The issue is that you are confusing the concept of a PUA in general with the countable collection of objects called PUAs. A private use area as a concept exists in several standards - BIG5 includes three codepoint ranges reserved for user-defined characters, and Shift JIS famously had several incompatible emoji specifications in its PUAs. If this article were about that concept, the singular uncapitalized title would be correct. But this article is not about the general concept, it is analogous to the Moons of Jupiter, where you have a distinctly countable set of items. If we had an article about private use areas as a concept, then there is an argument for this article being moved to "Private use areas in Unicode", but notice it would remain in the plural as a distinct collection of countable objects. VanIsaac, GHTV ^contr_about 17:31, 28 June 2026 (UTC)

Sure, there could be a case for broadening the scope of this article to discuss private-use code points in general. Although that's a different discussion to the proposal here, and you would need to propose that separately. And yes, in that case, it would make sense to title the article "private use area" (the generic term rather than the Unicode term); or perhaps "private-use code points", since Shift-JIS doesn't strictly have a private use area, but rather it has unassigned code points that vendors used to allocate their own private-use code points.

The article is currently about a type of block in Unicode which is called a "Private Use Area" in The Unicode Standard, of which there are three as of Unicode 17. If you wanted to be more explicit about it specifically being for Unicode, "Private Use Areas in Unicode" could work (to be consistent with The Unicode Standard, "Private Use Area" should be capitalized in this context). However, unless the article title explicitly includes "in Unicode" like that, there's no reason it needs to be pluralized — "Private Use Area" is used in the singular within The Unicode Standard to refer to this kind of block. In this sense, it's not substantially different to any other technical term in Unicode (block, plane, Unicode Transformation Format, etc.). SnorlaxMonster 12:31, 30 June 2026 (UTC)

• Oppose. DRMcCreedy (talk) 20:56, 27 June 2026 (UTC)

  But, uh, why? –Maltazarian ^{ᚾparley$\lor$investigateᛅ} 10:48, 3 July 2026 (UTC)

  This article seems like a catch-all for the three PUAs in Unicode, I'm guessing because an article for each PUA block would be excessive. That's how it differs in my mind from say, the Unicode block article. And that's why I'm mildly opposed to the rename. DRMcCreedy (talk) — Preceding undated comment added 15:32, 3 July 2026 (UTC)

Note: WikiProject Computing has been notified of this discussion. TarnishedPath^talk 08:48, 12 July 2026 (UTC)

• Leaning support, or Private Use Area in Unicode. What's wrong with Private use areas in Unicode?. If it's not the name of one specific area, I don't see the justification for capitalizing it. —⁠ ⁠BarrelProof (talk) 02:19, 13 July 2026 (UTC)

The n-gram leans towards uppercase. Randy Kryn (talk) 08:28, 13 July 2026 (UTC)

It's possible that when people discuss these areas, they tend to be discussing specific ones rather than the general concept of a type of area. This article appears to discuss three different specific such areas. A term that defines a class or category or type of thing is a common noun. —⁠ ⁠BarrelProof (talk) 16:55, 14 July 2026 (UTC)

I think you're applying an unusually strict definition of common noun. If we named the article about Mini (marque) "minis", most readers would be surprised to see it in lowercase, even though it discusses several different vehicles called Mini. pburka (talk) 16:19, 22 July 2026 (UTC)

• Oppose – The way I interpret this is that Unicode has three private use areas, and these have gained the proper names of "Private Use Area", "Supplementary Private Use Area-A" and "Supplementary Private Use Area-B" respectively. Renaming the article "Private Use Area" in the singular is to me not an option because that refers to one of them in particular. "Private use areas in Unicode" is a good descriptive title, but we shouldn't be using a descriptive title if a proper name is available (WP:COMMONNAME). In my view, there is one available here per "Private Use Areas" is a proper name covered by exception 1.2 of WP:PLURAL: Articles on groups of distinct entities that are nevertheless often considered together (preceded almost invariably by the word "the"), such as the Florida Keys, the Americas, or the Rivers of New Zealand. –Maltazarian ^{ᚾparley$\lor$investigateᛅ} 11:34, 19 July 2026 (UTC)

  I've made the lead make sense with respect to the title by the way. –Maltazarian ^{ᚾparley$\lor$investigateᛅ} 11:52, 19 July 2026 (UTC)

• Move to Private use areas in Unicode. The comment above correctly concludes that the singular title doesn't exactly refer to the scope of the article, and that there's no specific name for this and that a descriptive title is appropriate, but then rejects that outcome, in favour of the psuedo-propername "Private Use Areas" for reasons that aren't clear. A descriptive title is absolutely the way to go here - clear, precise, and doesn't make up proper names that don't exist to define this topic area. Cheers  — Amakuru (talk) 06:52, 23 July 2026 (UTC)

  I said that it's per exception 1.2 of WP:PLURAL. VanIsaac's argument holds up. We have evidence showing that "Private Use Areas" is used to refer to more than one Private Use Area at once (.."primary Private Use Area", while the Private Use Areas in Plane 15 and 16 are referred to as "supplementary Private Use Areas". It's a valid construction for the same reason as List of United States Congresses is, and as the article is about a fixed set of named items we go for the plural in the title, similar to Moons of Jupiter, as VanIsaac said. –Maltazarian ^{ᚾparley$\lor$investigateᛅ} 10:53, 23 July 2026 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.