LispWorks uses Unicode internally in its representation of character objects. All Unicode characters can be represented in strings, though 8-bit and 16-bit strings are also provided for efficiency when characters beyond the Latin-1 range (up to code #xff) or the BMP (Basic Multilingual Plane, up to code #xffff) respectively are not needed.
Character and string data can be input and output in various encodings (external formats).
LispWorks User Guide and Reference Manual - 20 Sep 2017