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The 8859 series, also known as ISO/IEC 8859, is a family of 8-bit character sets developed by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC). These character sets were designed to extend the ASCII character set, which only provides 128 characters, by adding another 128 code points. This allows for the representation of characters from various languages that use Latin alphabets, as well as some additional symbols.

The 8859 series is divided into several parts, each covering a different set of languages and regions. For instance, 8859-1, often referred to as Latin-1, is widely used for Western European languages. Other parts include 8859-2 for Central and Eastern European languages, 8859-3 for Southern European languages, and 8859-4 for Northern European languages. Each part occupies a specific range of code points, ensuring that characters from different languages do not conflict.

While the 8859 series provided a significant improvement over ASCII for multilingual support, its 8-bit limitation meant it could not encompass all the characters needed for every language worldwide. This led to the development of the Unicode standard, which uses a much larger number of code points and can represent characters from virtually all writing systems. Despite the rise of Unicode, the 8859 series remains relevant in some legacy systems and specific contexts where its limited character set is sufficient.