The symbol blocks

Unicode divides its codespace into blocks, and 55 of them are made mostly of symbols — 8,512 characters that are not letters, not digits, and not punctuation. A block qualifies here if at least three in five of its assigned characters carry a Symbol general category and it holds at least ten of them.

The families are the Institute’s grouping, not Unicode’s — the standard classifies blocks by codespace, never by purpose. Sorting them by what they are for produces the finding: the two largest families are notation and machines. The emoji-bearing family, the one everybody means when they say the word symbol, comes third.