ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) is a character encoding standard that assigns a unique 7-bit or 8-bit binary code to each character used in the English language and a few other characters commonly used in electronic communication. To represent a character using ASCII, its corresponding binary code is used. For example, the letter "A" is represented by the binary code 01000001 in ASCII, which is equivalent to the decimal value 65. Similarly, the character "@" is represented by the binary code 01000000, which is equivalent to the decimal value 64. The use of ASCII codes allows computers and other electronic devices to communicate and exchange information using a standardized set of characters, regardless of the language or operating system being used.