---
title: Character set
slug: Glossary/character_set
tags:
  - Glossary
  - character encoding
  - character set
---
A **character set** is an encoding system to let computers know how to recognize {{Glossary("Character")}}, including letters, numbers, punctuation marks, and whitespace.

In earlier times, countries developed their own character sets due to their different languages used, such as Kanji JIS codes (e.g. Shift-JIS, EUC-JP, etc.) for Japanese, Big5 for traditional Chinese, and KOI8-R for Russian. However, {{Glossary("Unicode")}} gradually became most acceptable character set for its universal language support.

If a character set is used incorrectly (For example, Unicode for an article encoded in Big5), you may see nothing but broken characters, which are called {{Interwiki("wikipedia", "Mojibake")}}.

## See also

- {{Interwiki("wikipedia", "Character encoding")}} (Wikipedia)
- {{Interwiki("wikipedia", "Mojibake")}} (Wikipedia)
- [Glossary](/en-US/docs/Glossary)

  - {{Glossary("Character")}}
  - {{Glossary("Unicode")}}
