Binary Alphabet

This is the simplified five-bit classroom code: A = 00001, B = 00010, and Z = 11010. It is not ASCII.

1. 1

   Choose a table

   The 8-bit tables cover uppercase letters, lowercase letters, digits and common punctuation. The 5-bit table is a separate classroom code and is labelled so it is not confused with ASCII.

2. 2

   Copy one value

   Press the copy button on a row to copy that binary group. Leading zeros are part of the value, so keep all eight digits when you paste it.

3. 3

   Write a name

   Use the name tool at the top of the page to turn a word into a space-separated binary string. The output uses the same 8-bit table as the chart.

4. 4

   Print the chart

   The print button produces a paper copy of the tables for a lesson, a library display or a coding exercise.

The binary alphabet is not a single fixed list. It depends on the character encoding. In ASCII and UTF-8, an uppercase A is 01000001, a lowercase a is 01100001, and the digit 0 is 00110000. Each character is stored in one byte, which is eight bits.

The tables on this page use 8-bit values because that is how modern text is normally grouped.

In ASCII, uppercase and lowercase letters sit in two blocks. The uppercase block starts at 01000001 for A, and the lowercase block starts at 01100001 for a. The difference is a single bit in the third position.

That one bit is useful: a program can switch case by changing one value instead of looking up a new character.

Some lessons use a simpler five-bit alphabet: A is 00001, B is 00010, and so on up to Z as 11010.

This is a teaching shortcut, not the code a computer uses for text. The 5-bit table is included because it is common in classroom worksheets and puzzles, and it is clearly separated from the 8-bit ASCII tables so the two are not mixed.

A name in binary is just the 8-bit value of each letter, written in order with spaces for readability. The name tool uses the same table as the chart, so a capital letter and a lowercase letter produce different results.

Tell the recipient which encoding you used; the same eight digits can mean different characters in different encodings.

Group the bits into blocks of eight, then look up each block in the table. A block that is shorter than eight bits is probably missing a leading zero. The main binary translator can decode a pasted string and will warn you when a group has the wrong length.

Spaces and punctuation have codes too. The space is 00100000, a period is 00101110, and a comma is 00101100. Those groups are easy to overlook when you are copying a message by hand.

What is the alphabet in binary? It is the set of 8-bit values for A–Z, a–z, digits and punctuation, as shown in the tables above. The same letters have different values in other encodings, so the table and the encoding have to match.

How do you say “hi” in binary? Lowercase h is 01101000 and i is 01101001, so the message is 01101000 01101001. With capital letters it would be 01001000 01101001 for “Hi”.

How do you write “I love you” in binary? Use the 8-bit values for each letter and keep the spaces as 00100000 groups. The result is longer than the English sentence because every character needs eight bits.