ISO/IEC 8859-1:1998, ''Information technology— 8-bit single-

byte The byte is a unit of digital information that most commonly consists of eight bits. Historically, the byte was the number of bits used to encode a single character of text in a computer and for this reason it is the smallest addressable un ...

coded graphic character sets—Part 1: Latin alphabet No. 1'', is part of the ISO/IEC 8859 series of

ASCII ASCII ( ), an acronym for American Standard Code for Information Interchange, is a character encoding standard for representing a particular set of 95 (English language focused) printable character, printable and 33 control character, control c ...

-based standard

character encoding Character encoding is the process of assigning numbers to graphical character (computing), characters, especially the written characters of human language, allowing them to be stored, transmitted, and transformed using computers. The numerical v ...

s, first edition published in 1987. ISO/IEC 8859-1 encodes what it refers to as "Latin alphabet no. 1", consisting of 191 characters from the

Latin script The Latin script, also known as the Roman script, is a writing system based on the letters of the classical Latin alphabet, derived from a form of the Greek alphabet which was in use in the ancient Greek city of Cumae in Magna Graecia. The Gree ...

. This character-encoding scheme is used throughout the

Americas The Americas, sometimes collectively called America, are a landmass comprising the totality of North America and South America.''Webster's New World College Dictionary'', 2010 by Wiley Publishing, Inc., Cleveland, Ohio. When viewed as a sing ...

Western Europe Western Europe is the western region of Europe. The region's extent varies depending on context. The concept of "the West" appeared in Europe in juxtaposition to "the East" and originally applied to the Western half of the ancient Mediterranean ...

Oceania Oceania ( , ) is a region, geographical region including Australasia, Melanesia, Micronesia, and Polynesia. Outside of the English-speaking world, Oceania is generally considered a continent, while Mainland Australia is regarded as its co ...

, and much of

Africa Africa is the world's second-largest and second-most populous continent after Asia. At about 30.3 million km2 (11.7 million square miles) including adjacent islands, it covers 20% of Earth's land area and 6% of its total surfac ...

. It is the basis for some popular 8-bit character sets and the first two blocks of characters in

Unicode Unicode or ''The Unicode Standard'' or TUS is a character encoding standard maintained by the Unicode Consortium designed to support the use of text in all of the world's writing systems that can be digitized. Version 16.0 defines 154,998 Char ...

. , 1.1% of all web sites use . It is the most declared single-byte character encoding, but as Web browsers and the

HTML5 HTML5 (Hypertext Markup Language 5) is a markup language used for structuring and presenting hypertext documents on the World Wide Web. It was the fifth and final major HTML version that is now a retired World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) recommend ...

standard interpret them as the superset Windows-1252, these documents may include characters from that set. Some countries or languages show a higher usage than the global average, in 2025 Brazil according to website use, use is at 2.9%, and in Germany at 2.3%. ISO-8859-1 was (according to the standard, at least) the default encoding of documents delivered via

HTTP HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol) is an application layer protocol in the Internet protocol suite model for distributed, collaborative, hypermedia information systems. HTTP is the foundation of data communication for the World Wide Web, wher ...

with a MIME type beginning with , the default encoding of the values of certain descriptive HTTP headers, and defined the repertoire of characters allowed in

HTML Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) is the standard markup language for documents designed to be displayed in a web browser. It defines the content and structure of web content. It is often assisted by technologies such as Cascading Style Sheets ( ...

3.2 documents. It is specified by many other standards. In practice, the superset encoding Windows-1252 is the more likely effective default and it is increasingly common for

UTF-8 UTF-8 is a character encoding standard used for electronic communication. Defined by the Unicode Standard, the name is derived from ''Unicode Transformation Format 8-bit''. Almost every webpage is transmitted as UTF-8. UTF-8 supports all 1,112,0 ...

to work whether or not a standard specifies it. ISO-8859-1 is the IANA preferred name for this standard when supplemented with the C0 and C1 control codes from ISO/IEC 6429. The following other aliases are registered: iso-ir-100, csISOLatin1, latin1, l1, IBM819, Code page 28591 a.k.a. Windows-28591 is used for it in Windows. IBM calls it code page 819 or CP819 ( CCSID 819).

Oracle An oracle is a person or thing considered to provide insight, wise counsel or prophetic predictions, most notably including precognition of the future, inspired by deities. If done through occultic means, it is a form of divination. Descript ...

calls it WE8ISO8859P1.

Coverage

Each character is encoded as a single eight-bit code value. These code values can be used in almost any data interchange system to communicate in the following languages (while it may exclude correct quotation marks such as for many languages including German and Icelandic):

Modern languages with complete coverage

Notes

Languages with incomplete coverage

ISO-8859-1 was commonly used for certain languages, even though it lacks characters used by these languages. In most cases, only a few letters are missing or they are rarely used, and they can be replaced with characters that are in ISO-8859-1 using some form of typographic approximation. The following table lists such languages. The letter ''ÿ'', which appears in French only very rarely, mainly in city names such as

L'Haÿ-les-Roses L'Haÿ-les-Roses () is a Communes of France, commune in the southern suburbs of Paris, France. It is located from the Kilometre Zero, centre of Paris. L'Haÿ-les-Roses is a Subprefectures in France, subprefecture of the Val-de-Marne ''Département ...

and never at the beginning of words, is included only in lowercase form. The slot corresponding to its uppercase form is occupied by the lowercase letter '' ß'' from the German language, which did not have an uppercase form at the time when the standard was created.

Quotation marks

Typographical (6- or 9-shaped) quotation marks are missing, as are any baseline quotation marks used by some of the supported languages. Only , , and are included. Some fonts will display the spacing grave accent (0x60) and the apostrophe (0x27) as a matching pair of oriented single quotation marks (see ), but this is not considered part of the modern standard.

Superscript digits

Only 3 superscript digits have been encoded: ² at 0xB2, ³ at 0xB3, and ¹ at 0xB9, lacking the superscript digit 0 and digits 4–9. Additionally, none of the subscript digits have been encoded. A workaround would be to use rich text formatting for the digits not covered by this standard.

Euro sign

The

euro sign The euro sign () is the currency sign used for the euro, the official currency of the eurozone. The design was presented to the public by the European Commission on 12 December 1996. It consists of a stylized letter E (or epsilon), crossed by ...

was first presented to the public on 12 December 1996. Due to this character set being introduced in 1987, it does not include the euro sign. Later character sets similar to ISO/IEC 8859-1 include a euro sign, such as Windows-1252 and ISO/IEC 8859-15.

History

ISO 8859-1 was based on the Multinational Character Set (MCS) used by

Digital Equipment Corporation Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC ), using the trademark Digital, was a major American company in the computer industry from the 1960s to the 1990s. The company was co-founded by Ken Olsen and Harlan Anderson in 1957. Olsen was president until ...

(DEC) in the popular VT220 terminal in 1983. It was developed within the European Computer Manufacturers Association (ECMA), and published in March 1985 as ECMA-94, by which name it is still sometimes known. The second edition of ECMA-94 (June 1986) also included ISO 8859-2, ISO 8859-3, and ISO 8859-4 as part of the specification. The original draft of ISO 8859-1 placed French ''Œ'' and ''œ'' at code points 215 (0xD7) and 247 (0xF7), as in the MCS. However, the delegate from France, being neither a linguist nor a typographer, falsely stated that these are not independent French letters on their own, but mere ligatures (like ''ﬁ'' or ''ﬂ''), supported by the delegate team from Bull Publishing Company, who regularly did not print French with ''Œ/œ'' in their house style at the time. An anglophone delegate from Canada insisted on retaining ''Œ/œ'' but was rebuffed by the French delegate and the team from Bull. These code points were soon filled with × and ÷ under the suggestion of the German delegation. Support for French was further reduced when it was again falsely stated that the letter ''ÿ'' is "not French", resulting in the absence of the capital ''Ÿ''. In fact, the letter ''ÿ'' is found in a number of French proper names, and the capital letter has been used in dictionaries and encyclopedias. These characters were added to ISO/IEC 8859-15:1999. BraSCII matches the original draft. In 1985, Commodore adopted ECMA-94 for its new

AmigaOS AmigaOS is a family of proprietary native operating systems of the Amiga and AmigaOne personal computers. It was developed first by Commodore International and introduced with the launch of the first Amiga, the Amiga 1000, in 1985. Early versions ...

operating system. The Seikosha MP-1300AI impact dot-matrix printer, used with the Amiga 1000, included this encoding. In 1990, the first version of

used the code points of ISO-8859-1 as the first 256 Unicode code points. In 1992, the IANA registered the character map ISO_8859-1:1987, more commonly known by its preferred

MIME A mime artist, or simply mime (from Greek language, Greek , , "imitator, actor"), is a person who uses ''mime'' (also called ''pantomime'' outside of Britain), the acting out of a story through body motions without the use of speech, as a the ...

name of ISO-8859-1 (note the extra hyphen over ISO 8859-1), a superset of ISO 8859-1, for use on the

Internet The Internet (or internet) is the Global network, global system of interconnected computer networks that uses the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) to communicate between networks and devices. It is a internetworking, network of networks ...

. This map assigns the C0 and C1 control codes to the unassigned code values thus provides for 256 characters via every possible 8-bit value.

Code page layout

Similar character sets

ISO/IEC 8859-15

ISO/IEC 8859-15 was developed in 1999, as an update of ISO/IEC 8859-1. It provides some characters for French and Finnish text and the

, which are missing from ISO/IEC 8859-1. This required the removal of some infrequently used characters from ISO/IEC 8859-1, including fraction symbols and letter-free diacritics: , , , , , , , and . Ironically, three of the newly added characters (, , and ) had already been present in DEC's 1983 Multinational Character Set (MCS), the predecessor to ISO/IEC 8859-1 (1987). Since their original code points were now reused for other purposes, the characters had to be reintroduced under different, less logical code points. ISO-IR-204, a more minor modification (called code page 61235 by FreeDOS), had been registered in 1998, altering ISO-8859-1 by replacing the universal currency sign (¤) with the euro sign (the same substitution made by ISO-8859-15).

Windows-1252

The popular Windows-1252 character set adds all the missing characters provided by ISO/IEC 8859-15, plus a number of typographic symbols, by replacing the rarely used C1 controls in the range 128 to 159 ( hex 80 to 9F). It is very common for Windows-1252 text to be mislabelled as ISO-8859-1. A common result was that all the quotes and apostrophes (produced by "smart quotes" in word-processing software) were replaced with question marks or boxes on non-Windows operating systems, making text difficult to read. Many Web browsers and e-mail clients will interpret ISO-8859-1 control codes as Windows-1252 characters, and that behavior was later standardized in

Mac Roman

The Apple Macintosh computer introduced a character encoding called Mac Roman in 1984. It was meant to be suitable for Western European

desktop publishing Desktop publishing (DTP) is the creation of documents using dedicated software on a personal ("desktop") computer. It was first used almost exclusively for print publications, but now it also assists in the creation of various forms of online co ...

. It is a superset of ASCII, and has most of the characters that are in ISO-8859-1 and all the extra characters from Windows-1252, but in a totally different arrangement. The few printable characters that are in ISO/IEC 8859-1, but not in this set, are often a source of trouble when editing text on Web sites using older Macintosh browsers, including the last version of Internet Explorer for Mac.

Other

DOS has code page 850, which has all printable characters that ISO-8859-1 has, albeit in a totally different arrangement, plus the most widely used graphic characters from code page 437. Between 1989 and 2015,

Hewlett-Packard The Hewlett-Packard Company, commonly shortened to Hewlett-Packard ( ) or HP, was an American multinational information technology company. It was founded by Bill Hewlett and David Packard in 1939 in a one-car garage in Palo Alto, California ...

used another superset of ISO-8859-1 on many of their calculators. This proprietary character set was sometimes referred to simply as "ECMA-94" as well. HP also has code page 1053, which adds the medium shade (▒, U+2592) at 0x7F. Several

EBCDIC Extended Binary Coded Decimal Interchange Code (EBCDIC; ) is an eight- bit character encoding used mainly on IBM mainframe and IBM midrange computer operating systems. It descended from the code used with punched cards and the corresponding si ...

code pages were purposely designed to have the same set of characters as ISO-8859-1, to allow easy conversion between them.

References

External links

ISO/IEC 8859-1:1998ISO/IEC FDIS 8859-1:1998
— 8-bit single-byte coded graphic character sets, Part 1: Latin alphabet No. 1 ''(draft dated February 12, 1998, published April 15, 1998)''
Standard ECMA-94: 8-Bit Single Byte Coded Graphic Character Sets — Latin Alphabets No. 1 to No. 4
''2nd edition (June 1986)''
ISO-IR 100
Right-Hand Part of Latin Alphabet No.1 ''(February 1, 1986)''
The Letter Database

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