UTF-8
Technology & Computing abbreviation · Computer
| Stands for | Unicode Transformation Format, 8-bit |
|---|---|
| Categories | Technology & Computing |
UTF-8 stands for Unicode Transformation Format, 8-bit, a computer abbreviation.
Variable-width encoding of Unicode that stores each character in one to four bytes while keeping plain English text byte-for-byte identical to ASCII. It is the dominant encoding on the web and the default in most modern operating systems, languages and file formats.
Example: If accented letters turn into gibberish, re-save the CSV as UTF-8.
Usage notes
Ken Thompson and Rob Pike designed UTF-8 in September 1992, reportedly sketching it on a diner placemat in New Jersey. Surveys find that about 98 percent of websites use it. Unicode itself is the character set, with more than 150,000 characters including emoji; UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 are ways of storing them as bytes. Garbled text from the wrong encoding is called mojibake.
Related abbreviations
More computer abbreviations
- TTY – Teletypewriter (Unix terminal)
- TUI – Text-based user interface
- UAC – User Account Control
- UEFI – Unified Extensible Firmware Interface
- UI – User interface
- UTF-16 – Unicode Transformation Format, 16-bit
- UX – User experience
- WIMP – Windows, icons, menus, pointer
- WinPE – Windows Preinstallation Environment
- WinRE – Windows Recovery Environment
- WPM – Words per minute
- WSL – Windows Subsystem for Linux