An Etymological Dictionary of Astronomy and Astrophysics

A standard code or protocol for displaying → characters as numbers. Each alphabetic, numeric, or special character is represented with a 7-bit binary number (a string of seven 0s or 1s). 128 possible characters are defined. For example, the ASCII code for uppercase C is 67 and for lowercase c is 99. Most computers use ASCII codes to represent text, which makes it possible to transfer data from one computer to another.

See also: Short for American Standard Code for Information Interchange.