Code points in the range U+D800–U+DBFF (1,024 code points) are known as high-surrogate code points, and code points in the range U+DC00–U+DFFF (1,024 code points) are known as low-surrogate code points. A high-surrogate code point (also known as a leading surrogate) followed by a low-surrogate code point (also known as a trailing surrogate) together form a surrogate pair used in UTF-16 to represent 1,048,576 code points outside BMP. High and low surrogate code points are not valid by themselves. Thus the range of code points that are available for use as characters is U+0000–U+D7FF and U+E000–U+10FFFF (1,112,064 code points). The value of these code points (i.e., excluding surrogates) is sometimes referred to as the character's scalar value.

What are code points in the range U+D800-U+DBFF known as?