A character set is a list of glyphs (letters, figures, symbols, ligatures, punctuations, etc.).

In digital fonts, character sets (also called encoding lists) contain the glyphs of a font with their individual names and Unicode references.

There are multiple character sets specific to various scripts or languages, as each contains the needed glyphs used by its respective language. Separated character sets per script or language allow a smaller and optimized file size.