Dictionary    Maps    Thesaurus    Translate    Advanced >   


Tip: Click Thesaurus above for synonyms. Also, follow synonym links within the dictionary to find definitions from other sources.

1. WordNet® 3.0 (2006)
ASCII
    n 1: (computer science) a code for information exchange between
         computers made by different companies; a string of 7 binary
         digits represents each character; used in most
         microcomputers [syn: American Standard Code for
         Information Interchange, ASCII]

2. The Collaborative International Dictionary of English v.0.48
ASCII \ASCII\ n. [Acronym: American Standard Code for
   Information Interchange.](Computers)
   1. the American Standard Code for Information Interchange, a
      code consisting of a set of 128 7-bit combinations used in
      digital computers internally, for display purposes, and
      for exchanging data between computers. It is very widely
      used, but because of the limited number of characters
      encoded must be supplemented or replaced by other codes
      for encoding special symbols or words in languages other
      than English. Also used attributively; -- as, an ASCII
      file.

   Syn: American Standard Code for Information Interchange.
        [PJC]

3. The Collaborative International Dictionary of English v.0.48
Ascii \As"ci*i\, Ascians \As"cians\, n. pl. [L. ascii, pl. of
   ascius, Gr. ? without shadow; 'a priv. + ? shadow.]
   Persons who, at certain times of the year, have no shadow at
   noon; -- applied to the inhabitants of the torrid zone, who
   have, twice a year, a vertical sun.
   [1913 Webster]

4. V.E.R.A. -- Virtual Entity of Relevant Acronyms (February 2016)
ASCII
       American Standard Code of Information Interchange
       

5. The Jargon File (version 4.4.7, 29 Dec 2003)
ASCII
 /as'kee/, n.

    [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.

    +-------------------------------------------------------------------------+
    | |Common: bang ; pling; excl; not; shriek; ball-bat; . Rare: factorial; exclam; smash; cuss; boing; yell; wow; hey;    |
    | |wham; eureka; [spark-spot]; soldier, control.                          |
    |-+-----------------------------------------------------------------------|
    | |Common: double quote; quote. Rare: literal mark; double-glitch;        |
    |"|snakebite; ; ; dirk; [rabbit-ears]; double  |
    | |prime.                                                                 |
    |-+-----------------------------------------------------------------------|
    | |Common: number sign; pound; pound sign; hash; sharp; crunch ; hex;   |
    |#|[mesh]. Rare: grid; cross?hatch; oc?to?thorpe; flash; ,        |
    | |pig-pen; tic?tac?toe; scratchmark; thud; thump; splat .              |
    |-+-----------------------------------------------------------------------|
    | |Common: dollar; . Rare: currency symbol; buck; cash;      |
    |$|bling; string (from BASIC); escape (when used as the echo of ASCII     |
    | |ESC); ding; cache; [big money].                                        |
    |-+-----------------------------------------------------------------------|
    |%|Common: percent; ; mod; grapes. Rare: [double-oh-seven]. |
    |-+-----------------------------------------------------------------------|
    | |Common: ; amp; amper; and, and sign. Rare: address (from C);|
    |&|reference (from C++); andpersand; bitand; background (from sh(1) );    |
    | |pretzel. [INTERCAL called this ampersand ; what could be sillier?]     |
    |-+-----------------------------------------------------------------------|
    |'|Common: single quote; quote; . Rare: prime; glitch; tick;  |
    | |irk; pop; [spark]; ; .    |
    |-+-----------------------------------------------------------------------|
    | |Common: l/r paren; l/r parenthesis; left/right; o?pen?/?close; par?en/ |
    |(|the?sis; o/c paren; o/c par?en?the?sis; l/r paren?the?sis; l/r         |
    |)|ba?na?na. Rare: so/al?ready; lparen/rparen; ; o/c round bracket, l/r round bracket, [wax/wane];        |
    | |par?en?this?ey/un?par?en?this?ey; l/r ear.                             |
    |-+-----------------------------------------------------------------------|
    | |Common: star; [ splat ]; . Rare: wildcard; gear; dingle;   |
    |*|mult; spider; aster; times; twinkle; glob (see glob ); Nathan Hale |
    | |.                                                                      |
    |-+-----------------------------------------------------------------------|
    |+|Common: ; add. Rare: cross; [intersection].                      |
    |-+-----------------------------------------------------------------------|
    |,|Common: . Rare: ; [tail].                              |
    |-+-----------------------------------------------------------------------|
    |-|Common: dash; ; . Rare: [worm]; option; dak; bithorpe.  |
    |-+-----------------------------------------------------------------------|
    |.|Common: dot; point; ; . Rare: radix point; full |
    | |stop; [spot].                                                          |
    |-+-----------------------------------------------------------------------|
    |/|Common: slash; stroke; ; forward slash. Rare: diagonal; solidus;|
    | |over; slak; virgule; [slat].                                           |
    |-+-----------------------------------------------------------------------|
    |:|Common: . Rare: dots; [two-spot].                               |
    |-+-----------------------------------------------------------------------|
    |;|Common: ; semi. Rare: weenie; [hybrid], pit-thwong.         |
    |-+-----------------------------------------------------------------------|
    | |Common: ; bra/ket; l/r angle; l/r angle bracket; l/|
    |<|r broket. Rare: from/into, towards; read from/write to; suck/blow;   |
    |>|comes-from/gozinta; in/out; crunch/zap (all from UNIX); tic/tac; [angle|
    | |/right angle].                                                         |
    |-+-----------------------------------------------------------------------|
    |=|Common: ; gets; takes. Rare: quadrathorpe; [half-mesh].        |
    |-+-----------------------------------------------------------------------|
    |?|Common: query; ; ques . Rare: quiz; whatmark; [what]; |
    | |wildchar; huh; hook; buttonhook; hunchback.                            |
    |-+-----------------------------------------------------------------------|
    |@|Common: at sign; at; strudel. Rare: each; vortex; whorl; [whirlpool];  |
    | |cyclone; snail; ape; cat; rose; cabbage; .              |
    |-+-----------------------------------------------------------------------|
    |V|Rare: [book].                                                          |
    |-+-----------------------------------------------------------------------|
    |[|Common: l/r square bracket; l/r bracket; ;   |
    |]|brack?et/un?brack?et. Rare: square?/?un?square; [U turn/U turn back].  |
    |-+-----------------------------------------------------------------------|
    | |Common: backslash, hack, whack; escape (from C/UNIX); reverse slash;   |
    |\|slosh; backslant; backwhack. Rare: bash; ; reversed     |
    | |virgule; [backslat].                                                   |
    |-+-----------------------------------------------------------------------|
    | |Common: hat; control; uparrow; caret; . Rare: xor sign,    |
    |^|chevron; [shark (or shark-fin)]; to the (?to the power of?); fang;     |
    | |pointer (in Pascal).                                                   |
    |-+-----------------------------------------------------------------------|
    |_|Common: ; underscore; underbar; under. Rare: score;         |
    | |backarrow; skid; [flatworm].                                           |
    |-+-----------------------------------------------------------------------|
    | |Common: backquote; left quote; left single quote; open quote; ; grave. Rare: backprime; [backspark]; unapostrophe; birk;      |
    | |blugle; back tick; back glitch; push; ; |
    | |quasiquote.                                                            |
    |-+-----------------------------------------------------------------------|
    | |Common: o/c brace; l/r brace; l/r squiggly; l/r squiggly bracket/brace;|
    ||l/r curly bracket/brace; . Rare: brace/unbrace; |
    ||curly/un?curly; leftit/rytit; l/r squirrelly; [embrace/bracelet]. A    |
    | |balanced pair of these may be called curlies .                         |
    |-+-----------------------------------------------------------------------|
    |||Common: bar; or; or-bar; v-bar; pipe; vertical bar. Rare: ; gozinta; thru; pipesinta (last three from UNIX); [spike].       |
    |-+-----------------------------------------------------------------------|
    |~|Common: ; squiggle; twiddle ; not. Rare: approx; wiggle; swung|
    | |dash; enyay; [sqiggle (sic)].                                          |
    +-------------------------------------------------------------------------+

    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.


6. The Free On-line Dictionary of Computing (30 December 2018)
American Standard Code for Information Interchange
ASCII

    The basis of character sets used in almost
   all present-day computers.  US-ASCII uses only the lower seven
   bits (character points 0 to 127) to convey some control
   codes, space, numbers, most basic punctuation, and unaccented
   letters a-z and A-Z.  More modern coded character sets (e.g.,
   Latin-1, Unicode) define extensions to ASCII for values above
   127 for conveying special Latin characters (like accented
   characters, or German ess-tsett), characters from non-Latin
   writing systems (e.g., Cyrillic, or Han characters), and such
   desirable glyphs as distinct open- and close-quotation marks.
   ASCII replaced earlier systems such as EBCDIC and Baudot,
   which used fewer bytes, but were each broken in their own way.

   Computers are much pickier 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.

   Individual characters are listed in this dictionary with
   alternative names from revision 2.3 of the Usenet ASCII
   pronunciation guide in rough order of popularity, including
   their official ITU-T names and the particularly silly names
   introduced by INTERCAL.

   See V ampersand, asterisk, back quote, backslash,
   caret, colon, comma, commercial at, control-C,
   dollar, dot, double quote, equals, exclamation mark,
   greater than, hash, left bracket, left parenthesis,
   less than, minus, parentheses, oblique stroke,
   percent, plus, question mark, right brace, right
   brace, right bracket, right parenthesis, semicolon,
   single quote, space, tilde, underscore, vertical
   bar, zero.

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

   The inability of US-ASCII to correctly represent nearly any
   language other than English became an obvious and intolerable
   misfeature as computer use outside the US and UK became the rule
   rather than the exception (see software rot).  And so national
   extensions to US-ASCII were developed, such as Latin-1.

   Hardware and software from the US continued for some time to
   embody the assumption that US-ASCII is the universal character set
   and that words of text consist entirely of byte values 65-90 and
   97-122 (A-Z and a-z); 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 sets of
   national characters produced an evolutionary pressure (especially
   in protocol design, e.g., the URL standard) to stick to
   US-ASCII as a subset common to all those in use, and therefore
   to stick to English as the language encodable with the common
   subset of all the ASCII dialects.  This basic problem with having
   a multiplicity of national character sets ended up being a prime
   justification for Unicode, which was designed, ostensibly, to be
   the *one* ASCII extension anyone will need.

   A system is described as "eight-bit clean" if it doesn't
   mangle text with byte values above 127, as some older systems
   did.

   See also ASCII character table, Yu-Shiang Whole Fish.

   (2014-10-05)


Common Misspellings >
Most Popular Searches: Define Misanthrope, Define Pulchritudinous, Define Happy, Define Veracity, Define Cornucopia, Define Almuerzo, Define Atresic, Define URL, Definitions Of Words, Definition Of Get Up, Definition Of Quid Pro Quo, Definition Of Irreconcilable Differences, Definition Of Word, Synonyms of Repetitive, Synonym Dictionary, Synonym Antonyms. See our main index and map index for more details.

©2011-2024 ZebraWords.com - Define Yourself - The Search for Meanings and Meaning Means I Mean. All content subject to terms and conditions as set out here. Contact Us, peruse our Privacy Policy