UCS-16

Occasionally articles about Unicode will mistakenly refer to UCS-16 as the 16-bit character encoding. This is not correct; UCS-2 is the 16-bit character encoding, and UCS-4 is the 32-bit character encoding; there is no UCS-16.

UTF-16 is another name for UCS-2; UTF-16 is the Unicode standard, while UCS-2 is the [ISO 10646]? standard, but in practice they are identical.

See Unicode, UCS.