Double byte character set

Double Byte Character Set (DBCS) refers to a character set that uses exactly two bytes to represent all characters . This means that a maximum of different characters can be displayed. In contrast to this, character sets that only require one byte per character are also known as single byte character sets (SBCS). ${\displaystyle 2^{8}\cdot 2^{8}=65.536}$

The meaning of the term DBCS has changed over time: in the past it could denote a character set that used a variable number of bytes per character. Such character sets are now known as multibyte character sets  (MBCS).

UTF-16 is often referred to as DBCS, but encodes characters outside of the Basic Multilingual Plane with four bytes and is therefore an MBCS.