short and char type in Java

The difference is that char is unsigned, short is signed. Thus, half the range of values of char is too big to be represented as a short (and of course, in symmetry, char cannot represent any of the negative values short can).

char is unsigned, short is signed.

So while they are both 2-byte long, they use the sixteenth bit for different purposes.

The range of the char type is 0 to 2^16 - 1 (0 to 65535).

The short range is -2^15 to 2^15 - 1 (−32,768 to 32,767).