JIS X 0208

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JIS X 0208 is a Japanese Industrial Standard defining a set of kanji indexed by a pair of integers from 1 to 94 (this is known as the kuten pair of the kanji). This standard was previously known as JIS-C-6226.

The standard defines two "levels" of kanji. Level 1 contains 2965 characters of the most common kanji (arranged by their on'yomi – Chinese style – pronunciation), and level 2 contains 3390 characters of the next most common kanji (arranged in dictionary order after the level 1 characters). Also encoded are katakana, hiragana, Latin characters, Greek, Cyrillic, line drawing characters and various symbols.

JIS X 0208 is incorporated into many Japanese encodings, such as Shift JIS, EUC-JP and ISO 2022-JP.

A small number of characters in the set have no recorded uses, and have unknown readings and meanings. They are called 幽霊文字 (yūreimoji, ghost characters). When the JIS set was being created, many documents were consulted to discover various place names, to make sure that a high percentage of Japanese place names would be represented in the set. During this process, some mistakes were made in the transmission of certain characters (e.g. a crease in a paper being interpreted as a stroke, or a scribbled character being incorrectly read) resulting in about 20 characters that have no known instances of use.

JIS X 0213 extends this standard, by adding more characters to this 94 × 94 character plane, while also adding another plane.