Big5
| MIME / IANA | Big5 |
|---|---|
| Alias(es) | Big-5, 大五碼 |
| Languages | Traditional Chinese, English Partial support: Simplified Chinese, Greek, Japanese, Russian, Bulgarian, some of IPA letters for phonetic usage. |
| Created by | Institute for Information Industry |
| Classification | Extended ASCII, variable-width encoding, DBCS, CJK encoding |
| Extends | ASCII |
| Extensions | Windows-950, Big5-HKSCS, numerous others |
| Other related encoding | CNS 11643 |
Big-5 or Big5 (Chinese: 大五碼) is a Chinese character encoding method used in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macau for traditional Chinese characters.
The People's Republic of China (PRC), which uses simplified Chinese characters, uses the GB 18030 character set instead (though it can also substitute Big-5 or UTF-8).
Big5 gets its name from the consortium of five companies in Taiwan that developed it.