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 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; 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; <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; 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>; amper; and, and sign. Rare:
address (from C); reference (from C++); andpersand; bitand;
background (from sh(1)); pretzel; amp. [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].
:
Common: <colon>. Rare: dots; [two-spot].
;
Common: <semicolon>; semi. Rare: weenie; [hybrid],
pit-thwong.
< >
Common: <less/greater than>; 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: <equals>; gets; takes. Rare: quadrathorpe;
[half-mesh].
?
Common: query; <question mark>; ques. Rare: whatmark; [what]; wildchar; huh;
hook; buttonhook; hunchback.
@
Common: at sign; at; strudel. Rare: each; vortex; whorl;
[whirlpool]; cyclone; snail; ape; cat; rose; cabbage;
<commercial at>.
V
Rare: [book].
[ ]
Common: l/r square bracket; l/r bracket; <opening/closing
bracket>; bracket/unbracket. Rare: square/unsquare; [U turn/U
turn back].
\
Common: backslash, hack, whack; escape (from C/UNIX); reverse
slash; slosh; backslant; backwhack. Rare: bash; <reverse
slant>; reversed virgule; [backslat].
^
Common: hat; control; uparrow; caret; <circumflex>.
Rare: xor sign, chevron; [shark (or shark-fin)]; to the (`to the
power of'); fang; pointer (in Pascal).
_
Common: <underline>; underscore; underbar; under. Rare:
score; backarrow; skid; [flatworm].
`
Common: backquote; left quote; left single quote; open quote;
<grave accent>; grave. Rare: backprime; [backspark];
unapostrophe; birk; blugle; back tick; back glitch; push;
<opening single quotation mark>; quasiquote.
{ }
Common: o/c brace; l/r brace; l/r squiggly; l/r squiggly
bracket/brace; l/r curly bracket/brace; <opening/closing
brace>. Rare: brace/unbrace; curly/uncurly; leftit/rytit; l/r
squirrelly; [embrace/bracelet].
|
Common: bar; or; or-bar; v-bar; pipe; vertical bar. Rare:
<vertical line>; gozinta; thru; pipesinta (last three from
UNIX); [spike].
~
Common: <tilde>; 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 pound graphic 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.