Dictionary:

ASCII

  (ăs'kē)

A standard for assigning numerical values to the set of letters in the Roman alphabet and typographic characters.

[A(merican) S(tandard) C(ode for) I(nformation) I(nterchange).]

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(American Standard Code for Information Interchange) standard code for representing characters as binary numbers, used on most microcomputers, computer terminals, and printers. In addition to printable characters, the ASCII code includes control characters to indicate carriage return, backspace, and the like.

Computer term. The code converts a character into a binary number used by most microcomputers and information services (on-line data bases) so that different makes of microcomputers may be able to communicate with each other. ASCII is used on most microcomputers, computer terminals, and printers. ASCII codes also include control characters that information services use. Many computer books and some software programs (e.g., Borland International's Sidekick) have a table of ASCII characters. The use of ASCII also allows for data files generated by one type of program (i.e., data base management system) to be used in another type of program (i.e., spreadsheet). An example of an ASCII application follows. Data may be downloaded from an information service (e.g., Dow Jones News/Retrieval) in ASCII and then loaded into a word processing program and edited and printed out or even sent to another computer using a telecommunications program. ASCII is quite helpful in electronic mail because with MCI, for example, the accountant can upload an ASCII file as electronic mail to his clients.

[originally an acronym (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) but now merely conventional] The predominant character set encoding of present-day computers. The standard version uses 7 bits for each character, whereas most earlier codes (including early drafts of ASCII prior to June 1961) used fewer. This change allowed the inclusion of lowercase letters — a major win — but it did not provide for accented letters or any other letterforms not used in English (such as the German sharp-S ?. or the ae-ligature ? which is a letter in, for example, Norwegian). It could be worse, though. It could be much worse. See EBCDIC to understand how. A history of ASCII and its ancestors is at http://www.wps.com/texts/codes/index.html.

Computers are much pickier and less flexible about spelling than humans; thus, hackers need to be very precise when talking about characters, and have developed a considerable amount of verbal shorthand for them. Every character has one or more names — some formal, some concise, some silly. Common jargon names for ASCII characters are collected here. See also individual entries for bang, excl, open, ques, semi, shriek, splat, twiddle, and Yu-Shiang Whole Fish.

This list derives from revision 2.3 of the Usenet ASCII pronunciation guide. Single characters are listed in ASCII order; character pairs are sorted in by first member. For each character, common names are given in rough order of popularity, followed by names that are reported but rarely seen; official ANSI/CCITT names are surrounded by brokets: <>. Square brackets mark the particularly silly names introduced by INTERCAL. The abbreviations “l/r” and “o/c” stand for left/right and “open/close” respectively. Ordinary parentheticals provide some usage information.

The pronunciation of # as ‘pound’ is common in the U.S. but a bad idea; Commonwealth Hackish has its own, rather more apposite use of ‘pound sign’ (confusingly, on British keyboards the £ happens to replace #; thus Britishers sometimes call # on a U.S.-ASCII keyboard ‘pound’, compounding the American error). The U.S. usage derives from an old-fashioned commercial practice of using a # suffix to tag pound weights on bills of lading. The character is usually pronounced ‘hash’ outside the U.S. There are more culture wars over the correct pronunciation of this character than any other, which has led to the ha ha only serious suggestion that it be pronounced “shibboleth” (see Judges 12:6 in an Old Testament or Tanakh).

The ‘uparrow’ name for circumflex and ‘leftarrow’ name for underline are historical relics from archaic ASCII (the 1963 version), which had these graphics in those character positions rather than the modern punctuation characters.

The ‘swung dash’ or ‘approximation’ sign (∼) is not quite the same as tilde ~ in typeset material, but the ASCII tilde serves for both (compare angle brackets).

Some other common usages cause odd overlaps. The #, $, >, and & characters, for example, are all pronounced “hex” in different communities because various assemblers use them as a prefix tag for hexadecimal constants (in particular, # in many assembler-programming cultures, $ in the 6502 world, > at Texas Instruments, and & on the BBC Micro, Sinclair, and some Z80 machines). See also splat.

The inability of ASCII text to correctly represent any of the world's other major languages makes the designers' choice of 7 bits look more and more like a serious misfeature as the use of international networks continues to increase (see software rot). Hardware and software from the U.S. still tends to embody the assumption that ASCII is the universal character set and that characters have 7 bits; this is a major irritant to people who want to use a character set suited to their own languages. Perversely, though, efforts to solve this problem by proliferating ‘national’ character sets produce an evolutionary pressure to use a smaller subset common to all those in use.

For more information on ASCII, visit Britannica.com.

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Dansk (Danish)
abbr. - American Standard Code for Information Interchange
n. - ASCII-tegn, ASCII-værdi

Nederlands (Dutch)
computer lettersysteem

Français (French)
abbr. - (Comput) ASCII (schéma de codage sur 7 ou 8 bits)

Deutsch (German)
abbr. - Amerikanischer Standardcode zum Informationsaustausch, Computercode zur Darstellung von Buchstaben und Zahlen

Ελληνική (Greek)
abbr. - (Η/Υ) Αμερικανικός Πρότυπος Κώδικας για την Ανταλλαγή Πληροφοριών
n. - κώδικας εναλλαξιμότητας μεταξύ διαφόρων τύπων συσκευών και προγραμμάτων Η/Υ

Italiano (Italian)
ASCII, codice standard americano per lo scambio di informazioni digitali

Português (Portuguese)
abbr. - Código (m) Padrão Americano para Troca de Informações (Inf.)
n. - ASCII

Русский (Russian)
"АСКИ" - (компьют) американский стандарт кодировки символов

Español (Spanish)
abbr. - código estándar norteamericano para el intercambio de información
n. - código estándar norteamericano para el intercambio de información

Svenska (Swedish)
abbr. - ASCII
n. - ASCII-tecken, ASCII-fil

中文（简体） (Chinese (Simplified))
美国信息交换标准码

中文（繁體） (Chinese (Traditional))
abbr. - 美國資訊交換標準碼
n. - 美國資訊交換標準碼

한국어 (Korean)
abbr. - American Standard Code for Information Interchange(정보 교환용 미국 표준 코드)
n. - 정보 교환용 미국 표준 코드

日本語 (Japanese)
abbr. - (電算)アスキー

العربيه (Arabic)
‏(اختصار) مختصر ل رمز تبادل المعلومات في المواصفات الأمريكيه (الاسم)‏

עברית (Hebrew)
abbr. - ‮צופן תקני לייצוג תווים במחשב‬
n. - ‮אסקי (תווי מחשב)‬

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