ASCII

/askee/ , 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; exclamation mark. 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; quotation marks ; dieresis ;  dirk; [rabbit-ears]; double prime. # Common: number sign; pound; pound sign; hash; sharp; crunch ; hex; [mesh]. Rare: grid; crosshatch; octothorpe;  flash; square , pig-pen; tictactoe; scratchmark;  thud; thump; splat. $ Common: dollar; dollar sign. Rare: currency symbol;  buck; cash; bling; string (from BASIC); escape (when used as the echo of  ASCII ESC); ding; cache; [big money]. % Common: percent; percent sign ; mod; grapes. Rare:  [double-oh-seven]. Common: ampersand ; 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; apostrophe. Rare: prime;  glitch; tick; irk; pop; [spark]; closing single quotation  mark ; acute accent. ( ) Common: l/r paren; l/r parenthesis; left/right;  open/close; paren/thesis; o/c paren;  o/c parenthesis; l/r parenthesis; l/r  banana. Rare: so/already; lparen/rparen; opening/closing parenthesis ; o/c round bracket, l/r round  bracket, [wax/wane];  parenthisey/unparenthisey;  l/r ear. * Common: star; [ splat ]; asterisk. Rare: wildcard; gear; dingle; mult; spider;  aster; times; twinkle; glob (see glob ); Nathan Hale. + Common: plus ; add. Rare: cross;  [intersection]. , Common: comma. Rare: cedilla ; [tail]. - Common: dash; hyphen ; minus. Rare: [worm];  option; dak; bithorpe.. Common: dot; point; period ; decimal point.  Rare: radix point; full stop; [spot]. / Common: slash; stroke; slant ; forward slash. Rare:  diagonal; solidus; over; slak; virgule; [slat].