With the internationalization of computer software, wide characters became necessary, to handle texts in different languages. In particular, Unicode characters (or strictly speaking code points) can be 1, 2, 3 or 4 bytes in UTF-8, and other encodings of Unicode use two or four bytes per code point.
As computer software becomes more internationalized, wide characters are needed to accommodate text from different languages.  Unicode characters (or their numerical representations) can be one, two, three, or four bytes long in UTF-8 encoding, and other encodings use two or four bytes per character.