ASCII latin
How ASCII latin works
The 52 Latin letters in ASCII span two ranges: uppercase A-Z at codes 65-90 and lowercase a-z at codes 97-122. The 32-position gap between them is not a coincidence - flipping bit 5 (adding or subtracting 32) converts between cases. This made case conversion trivial on 1960s hardware that could only toggle individual bits.
ASCII's Latin-only design means it cannot represent accented characters like e, u, or n directly. Encodings like ISO-8859-1 and Windows-1252 added those in the 128-255 range, and Unicode now covers every Latin-derived script. Browse our Latin character group or see related diacritical groups: acute, grave, circumflex, tilde, cedilla.
ASCII's Latin-only design means it cannot represent accented characters like e, u, or n directly. Encodings like ISO-8859-1 and Windows-1252 added those in the 128-255 range, and Unicode now covers every Latin-derived script. Browse our Latin character group or see related diacritical groups: acute, grave, circumflex, tilde, cedilla.