wideencoding

noun

UK /ˈwaɪd.ɪnˌkəʊ.dɪŋ/

US /ˈwaɪd.ɪnˌkoʊ.dɪŋ/

A way of storing letters and symbols so that a computer can use many different languages.

The program uses wideencoding so it can show Chinese, Arabic, and English text at the same time.

SYNONYMS

Unicode encoding multibyte encoding broad character encoding universal encoding

RELATED WORDS

character set code point UTF-16 text encoding locale

OTHER MEANINGS

2. A character encoding that uses more than one byte for each symbol.

Older systems switched to wideencoding to handle Japanese characters.

3. The process of converting text into a wide-character format inside a program.

The developer added wideencoding before reading the multilingual file.

4. A setting in software that allows characters from many scripts to be displayed correctly.

Turn on wideencoding in the editor to avoid garbled symbols.