ASCII

American  

[as-kee] / ˈæs ki /

noun

Computers.

1. American Standard Code for Information Interchange: a standard code, consisting of 128 7-bit combinations, for characters stored in a computer or to be transmitted between computers.

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ASCII British  

/ ˈæskiː /

acronym

1. American standard code for information interchange: a computer code for representing alphanumeric characters

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ASCII Scientific  

/ ăs′kē /

1. A code that assigns the numbers 0 through 127 to the letters of the alphabet, the digits 0 through 9, punctuation marks, and certain other characters. For example, the capital letter A is coded as 65 (binary 1000001). By standardizing the values used to represent written text, ASCII enables computers to exchange information. Basic, or standard, ASCII uses seven bits for each character code, giving it 2 ⁷, or 128, unique symbols. Various larger character sets, called extended ASCII, use eight bits for each character, yielding 128 additional codes numbered 128 to 255.

2. Compare Unicode

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ASCII Cultural  

1. An acronym for A merican S tandard C ode for I nformation I nterchange. Computers use this code to standardize communication between different machines.

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Etymology

Origin of ASCII

First recorded in 1960–65

Example Sentences

The meme suggests ASCII, a method of rendering characters using either seven or eight binary digits.

From Slate • Apr. 17, 2013

Baudot’s code developed the principle that eventually became the basis for ASCII, or the American Standard Code for Information Interchange, which is the way in which nearly every computer and phone now represents text.

From Slate • Dec. 7, 2012

It is also essential to know how to convert a file created with your word processing program into "ASCII" or "text" format, which will let you share your thoughts with others across the Net.

From Big Dummy's Guide to the Internet by Electronic Frontier Foundation

Ten years later, in 2008, 50% of all the documents available on the internet were encoded in Unicode, with the other 50% encoded in ASCII.

From A Short History of EBooks by Lebert, Marie

But as it happened, Teletype had to use a lot of persuasion just to keep ASCII, and the Model 33 keyboard, from looking like this instead: !

From The Jargon File, Version 4.2.2, 20 Aug 2000 by Steele, Guy L.