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Acronym for the American Standard Code for Information Interchange.
Pronounced ask-ee, ASCII is a code for representing English characters as numbers,
with each letter assigned a number from 0 to 127. For example, the ASCII code for
uppercase M is 77. Most computers use ASCII codes to represent text, which makes it
possible to transfer data from one computer to another.
Text files stored in ASCII format are sometimes called ASCII files. Text editors and word
processors are usually capable of storing data in ASCII format, although ASCII format is
not always the default storage format. Most data files, particularly if they contain numeric
data, are not stored in ASCII format. Executable programs are never stored in ASCII
format.
The standard ASCII character set uses just 7 bits for each character. There are several
larger character sets that use 8 bits, which gives them 128 additional characters. The
extra characters are used to represent non-English characters, graphics symbols, and
mathematical symbols. Several companies and organizations have proposed extensions
for these 128 characters. The DOS operating system uses a superset of ASCII called
extended ASCII or high ASCII. A more universal standard is the ISO Latin 1 set of
characters, which is used by many operating systems, as well as Web browsers.
Another set of codes that is used on large IBM computers is EBCDIC.
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