[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 ß. or the ae-ligature æ 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; par
en/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/unparen
thisey; 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: quiz; 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 brack
et>; 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]. A balanced pair of these may be called curlies .
| 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 £ 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 (?1) 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.
[glossary]
[Reference(s) to this entry by made by: {amper}{angle brackets}{bang}{crunch}{excl}{hat}{Nathan Hale}{octal forty}{slash}{splat}{stroke}{strudel}{text}{thud}]