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Notes on ASCII
[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;
#
Common: number sign; pound; pound sign; hash; sharp; CRUNCH ; hex; [mesh].
Rare: grid; crosshatch; octothorpe; flash;
$
Common: dollar;
Rare: currency symbol; buck; cash; string (from BASIC); escape (when used as the echo of ASCII ESC); ding; cache; [big money].
%
Common: percent;
Rare: [double-oh-seven].
&
Common:
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; open/close; paren/thesis; o/c paren; o/c parenthesis; l/r parenthesis; l/r banana.
Rare: so/already; lparen/rparen;
*
Common: star; [ SPLAT ];
Rare: wildcard; gear; dingle; mult; spider; aster; times; twinkle; glob (see GLOB ); NATHAN HALE .
+
Common:
Rare: cross; [intersection].
,
Common:
Rare:
-
Common: dash;
Rare: [worm]; option; dak; bithorpe.
.
Common: dot; point;
Rare: radix point; full stop; [spot].
/
Common: slash; stroke;
Rare: diagonal; solidus; over; slak; virgule; [slat].
:
Common:
Rare: dots; [two-spot].
;
Common:
Rare: weenie; [hybrid], pit-thwong.
< >
Common:
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:
Rare: quadrathorpe; [half-mesh].
?
Common: query;
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;
Rare: square/unsquare; [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:
Rare: score; backarrow; skid; [flatworm].
`
Common: backquote; left quote; left single quote; open quote;
Rare: backprime; [backspark]; unapostrophe;
birk; blugle; back tick; back glitch; push;
Common: o/c brace; l/r brace; l/r squiggly; l/r squiggly
bracket/brace; l/r curly bracket/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:
~
Common:
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.
J3N Research Labs
Last Updated: 19th May 2007