ASCII stands for “American Standard Code for Information Interchange”. It is a character encoding system that assigns a unique numerical value to each printable and non-printable character in the English alphabet, such as letters, digits, punctuation marks, and control characters.

In the ASCII encoding system, each character is represented by a 7-bit binary number, which can be interpreted as a decimal number between 0 and 127. For example, the ASCII code for the letter “A” is 65, the code for the digit “0” is 48, and the code for the punctuation mark “.” is 46.

ASCII values are used in computer systems to represent characters in text documents, communicate information between different computer systems, and perform various other tasks related to character encoding and manipulation.