Are UTF16 (as used by for example wide-winapi functions) characters always 2 byte long?

Question

Please clarify for me, how does UTF16 work? I am a little confused, considering these points:

• There is a static type in C++, WCHAR, which is 2 bytes long. (alway

Answer 1

This Wikipedia article seems to be a good intro.

UTF-16 (16-bit Unicode Transformation Format) is a character encoding for Unicode capable of encoding 1,112,064 numbers (called code points) in the Unicode code space from 0 to 0x10FFFF. It produces a variable-length result of either one or two 16-bit code units per code point.