astral plane

plural astral planes

1. fantasyA supernatural plane of existence consisting of the world of the celestial spheres, propounded by esoteric philosophies, some religious teachings, and New Age thought.

   The realm of the astral plane is an intermediate realm; below is the world of matter, above is the world of pure Being.

   1981, William Irwin Thompson, The Time Falling Bodies Take to Light: Mythology, Sexuality and the Origins of Culture, London: Rider/Hutchinson & Co., page 221

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   Incidentally, such beings may be said to have an existence of a sort upon the lower astral plane; they are elementals created by man's evil desires and unclean thoughts.

   1936, Rollo Ahmed, The Black Art, London: Long, page 115

   Synonyms: astral world, desire world

2. humorousslangcomputingA Unicode plane (range of code points) above the Basic Multilingual Plane; any plane beyond U+FFFF.

   Emoji are in the astral plane.

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   If your application works with MathML, or in various languages whose character sets gained support in Unicode 3.1 through the so-called Astral Planes, you will need to know that what Java calls a char is not really the same thing as a Unicode character or an XML character.

   2002, David Brownell, SAX2, O'Reilly Media, →ISBN, page 110

   The answer was UTF-16. Two blocks of 16-bit values were set aside for use as special values for encoding astral plane characters.

   2002, Lars Marius Garshol, “Re: Stupid Unicode/UTF-16 Question”, in comp.text.xml (Usenet)

   UTF-16 encodes every character from O—65535 as 2 bytes; it then uses some dirty hacks if you actually need to represent the rarely used astral plane Unicode characters beyond 65535.

   2009, Mark Pilgrim, Dive Into Python 3, Apress, →ISBN, page 55

   The astral planes include some such characters, notably in the CJK extensions, without which it is impossible to write some people's names correctly.

   2011, Tom Anderson, “Efficient unicode string implementation was: Re: Why No Supplemental Characters In Character Literals?”, in comp.lang.java.programmer (Usenet)

   Such characters are in the so-called “Astral Planes,” with a code point above U+FFFF.

   2011, David Hunter, Jeff Rafter, et al. (6 other authors), Beginning XML, John Wiley & Sons, →ISBN, page 134