Definitions for "Multibyte"
Keywords:  utf, taiwan, unicode, chinese, language
Two or more bytes. When character codes are assigned to all characters in a specific language or a group of languages, one byte (8 bits) can represent 256 different characters. Two bytes (16 bits) can represent up to 65,536 different characters. Two bytes are not enough to represent all the characters for many languages. Some characters require 3 or 4 bytes. One example is the UTF8 Unicode encoding. In UTF8, there are many 2-byte and 3-byte characters. Another example is Traditional Chinese, used in Taiwan. It has more than 80,000 characters. Some character encoding schemes that are used in Taiwan use 4 bytes to encode characters. See also single byte.
(National Language Support Guide; search in this book)