Glossary of Common Site Terms
Welcome to our comprehensive glossary containing definitions for important ASCII-related keywords and concepts, including ASCII characters, ASCII control characters, ASCII printable characters, and extended ASCII characters. New terms will be added to the glossary over time. If you cannot find the term you are looking for, please email us so that we can consider adding it to the glossary.
- 7-bit refers to the size of a unit of data, with 7 bits allowing for 2^7, or 128 possible values, commonly used in character encoding standards such as ASCII.
- 8-bit refers to the size of a unit of data, with 8 bits allowing for 2^8, or 256 possible values, commonly used in computer architecture and character encoding.
- Acute characters are symbols or letters with a diacritic mark, represented by a small vertical line, placed over a letter to indicate a different pronunciation.
- Alt codes are special keyboard codes used to enter characters not found on standard keyboards, such as mathematical symbols and accented letters.
- ANSI (American National Standards Institute) is a non-profit organization that develops and promotes standards in various industries, including computer character encoding.
- ASCII is a character encoding standard that represents English characters and a small set of symbols using 7 bits, making 128 characters in total.
- ASCII art is a form of digital art that uses ASCII characters to create images, pictures, and designs. It is created using only text characters.
- ASCII code is a set of standardized codes used to represent characters and symbols in computers, with each code corresponding to a unique character.
- A visual representation of characters and symbols in a code page, used for selecting characters in text and understanding the range of characters available.
- ASCII control characters are non-printable characters in the ASCII standard used to control various functions such as formatting, transmission control, and others.
- ASCII Latin refers to the character encoding standard that represents text using 128 characters based on the Latin alphabet, including letters, numbers, punctuation, and symbols.
- ASCII printable characters are the 95 characters in the ASCII standard that are able to be displayed and printed, including letters, numbers, and symbols.
- ASCII script refers to text written using the ASCII character set, which includes letters, numbers, punctuation, and control characters.
- An ASCII table is a reference tool that lists and displays the ASCII characters and their corresponding decimal, hexadecimal, and binary values.
- Ascii85 is an ASCII-based binary-to-text encoding method used to reduce the size of binary data for transmission or storage in ASCII-only systems.
- ASCII backspace (BS) is a control character in the ASCII character set used to erase the previous character in a text field or document, represented by code 8.
- Basic Latin is the first 128 characters of the Unicode character set, including the standard ASCII characters and a few additional ones.
- Binary is a numeral system using 2 symbols, 0 and 1, to represent numbers. It's the fundamental language of computers, where each digit represents a switch that is either on or off.
- Caron characters are symbols or letters with a diacritic mark, represented by a small V-shaped line, placed over a letter to indicate a different pronunciation.
- ASCII carriage return (CR) is a control character in the ASCII character set used to start a new line or reset the cursor position, represented by code 13.
- Cedilla characters are symbols or letters with a diacritic mark, represented by a small curved line, placed under the letter 'c' to indicate a different pronunciation.
- A character refers to a single letter, symbol, or punctuation mark used to represent text. In computing, characters are represented by code points.
- Character encoding is a method of mapping characters (letters, symbols, and emoji) to numerical values (code points) to facilitate the storage and processing of text in computers.
- A character set is a collection of characters and symbols used in computer systems, such as the ASCII and Unicode character sets.
- Circumflex is a diacritical mark (^) used in various writing systems to indicate a long vowel sound or to indicate emphasis.
- A code page is a table of characters and their corresponding numeric codes used by computers to encode characters in a particular script.
- Code page 437 is an 8-bit character encoding standard used on IBM PC and compatibles, defining 256 characters including standard ASCII characters, line-drawing characters, and more.
- A code point is a unique number assigned to each character in a character encoding standard, used to represent that character in a computer.
- ASCII delete (DEL) is a control character in the ASCII character set used to delete a character or data, represented by code 127.
- Diaeresis characters are symbols or letters with two dots placed over a letter to indicate that it should be pronounced as a separate syllable.
- DOS code pages are character encoding schemes used in MS-DOS and early versions of Windows to represent characters in different languages. These code pages were limited to 256 characters.
- ASCII escape is a control character in the ASCII character set used to start escape sequences, representing special characters or sending commands, represented by code 27.
- Extended ASCII adds an additional 128 characters to the ASCII standard, for a total of 256 characters, including accented letters, special symbols, and more.
- A graphic character is a symbol or glyph that is used to represent a particular character or symbol in written communication.
- Grave accent characters are symbols or letters with a diacritic mark, represented by a small vertical line, placed before a letter to indicate a different pronunciation.
- Hexadecimal is a numbering system with base 16, using the digits 0-9 and A-F to represent values 0-15. Commonly used in computing to represent colors, characters and memory addresses.
- HTML entities are codes that represent special characters, such as symbols and non-English characters, in HTML documents.
- HTML names refer to the specific codes used in HTML to display certain characters, such as special symbols and foreign characters.
- The Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) is a department of ICANN responsible for maintaining global IP address allocation, domain name system management, and root zone management.
- ISO Latin-1 (ISO 8859-1) is a standardized 8-bit character encoding that covers the Latin alphabet and its extensions. It's widely used for Western European languages and supports 256 characters.
- ISO-8859-1 is a character encoding standard similar to ASCII, but with support for additional characters used in Western European languages.
- The Latin alphabet, also known as the Roman alphabet, is an alphabet consisting of 26 letters used to write the Latin language and later adopted by many other languages.
- Line Feed (LF) is a control character used in ASCII and Unicode to represent a line break or new line in text. It is often used to separate lines in a text file or output.
- Lowercase refers to the smaller letters in the alphabet, as opposed to uppercase letters which are larger. It is commonly used for the body of text in written language.
- Microsoft code pages are character encoding schemes used to represent characters in different languages on Windows platforms.
- Octal is a base-8 number system used in computing that represents numbers using only the digits 0-7. It is used to represent values in binary form.
- Punctuation refers to symbols used in writing to separate and organize phrases and sentences, including commas, periods, and other marks.
- Standard ASCII is a character encoding standard that represents text using 128 characters, including letters, numbers, punctuation, and symbols, based on the English alphabet.
- A superset is a set that contains all elements of another set, plus additional elements.
- ASCII symbols are characters in the ASCII character set, including letters, numbers, punctuation, and control characters, represented by a unique number code between 0-127.
- ASCII tab (HT) is a control character in the ASCII character set used to create spaces or align text, represented by code 9.
- Tilde characters are symbols or letters with a diacritic mark, represented by a small wave, placed over a letter to indicate a different pronunciation.
- Unicode is a computing industry standard for consistent encoding of written characters from the world's scripts.
- Uppercase refers to the larger, capital letters in the alphabet as opposed to lowercase, smaller letters. It is commonly used for the first letter of sentences, proper nouns, and acronyms.
- URL escape code is a method of encoding special characters in a URL to ensure it is transmitted properly over the internet. It uses a percentage symbol followed by two hexadecimal digits.
- UTF-16 is a character encoding standard that uses 2 bytes (16 bits) to represent characters, including characters from most scripts used in the world.
- UTF-32 is a character encoding standard that uses 4 bytes (32 bits) per character, allowing for representation of the entire Unicode character set.
- UTF-8 is a character encoding standard that supports the representation of a wide range of characters from multiple languages and scripts.
- White space characters are characters used in text to separate words and sentences. Examples include spaces, tabs, and line breaks.
- Windows-1252 is a character encoding standard used in the Western version of Microsoft Windows that supports most Western European languages.