Short for
double-byte character set, a
character set that uses two-
byte (16-
bit)
characters rather than one-byte (8-bit) characters. Some languages, such as Chinese, Japanese and Korean, have writing schemes with many different characters that cannot be represented with single-byte codes such as
ASCII and
EBCDIC. In a single-byte character set, the possible number of
binary combinations is 256; the number increases to 65,536 in a double byte character set.
DBCS characters must be used with hardware and software that support the double-byte format.
