ASCII
American character encoding standard
ASCII ( ASS-kee), an acronym for American Standard Code for Information Interchange, is a character encoding standard for representing a particular set of 95 (English-language–focused) printable and 33 control characters – a total of 128 code points. The set of available punctuation had significant impact on the syntax of computer languages and text markup. ASCII hugely influenced the design of character sets used by modern computers; for example, the first 128 code points of Unicode are the same as ASCII.
ASCII encodes each code-point as a value from 0 to 127 – storable as a seven-bit integer. Ninety-five code-points are printable, including digits 0 to 9, lowercase letters a to z, uppercase letters A to Z, and commonly used punctuation symbols. For example, the letter i is represented as 105 (decimal). Also, ASCII specifies 33 non-printing control codes which originated with Teletype devices, most of which are now obsolete. The control characters that are still commonly used include carriage return, line feed, and tab.
ASCII lacks code-points for characters with diacritical marks and therefore does not directly support terms or names such as résumé, jalapeño, or naïve. But, depending on hardware and software support, some diacritical marks can be rendered by overwriting a letter with a backtick (`) or tilde (~).
The Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) prefers the name US-ASCII for this character encoding.
The public source identifies “ASCII” as american character encoding standard. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around ASCII, American and character.
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A short description can identify a subject without explaining its stakes. For “ASCII”, the useful work is to connect “american character encoding standard” to the records capable of establishing context and consequence.
The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 17, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q8815. The Library of Congress control number is sh98005902. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank.
Overview language is designed for orientation and should not be treated as a substitute for the evidence cited beneath it. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “ASCII” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.